June 3 – 6, 2009 The Working Class Studies Association (WCSA) is pleased to announce that its biennial Conference will be held at the University of Pittsburgh, June 3 – 6, 2009. Proposals are invited for presentations, panels, workshops, and performances, according to the guidelines attached. Proposals must be received by January 4, 2009.

(Note to working class literature publishers — if
your book costs more than two hours' wage for the average working class
worker, you may be publishing about the working class, but
are you publishing for the working class? Not all working
people have access to public libraries, and not all libraries stock
working class titles.)

Fiction —Non-fiction

The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer — Mark
Twain. Mischief is Tom Sawyer's middle name. There is nothing
he likes better than playing hookey from school, messing about on the
Mississippi with his best friend, the hobo Huckleberry Finn, or wooing
the elusive beauty Becky Thatcher. Lazy and reckless, he is a menace
to his Aunt Polly — 'Tom, I've a notion to skin you alive' — an
embarrassment to his teachers and the envy of his peers. But there is
method in his
badness. He exhibits all the cunning of a magpie when hatching an elaborate
scheme to avoid whitewashing a fence, and an adventure downriver with
Huck and Joe Harper plunges the little town of St Petersburg into such
an outpouring of grief that Tom is spared the belt on his return. But
the innocent adventures end suddenly when Tom and Huck witness a murder
in the graveyard. Should they tell of what they saw under the moonlight,
when Injun Joe slipped the bloodstained knife into the hands of Muff
Potter? Or should they 'keep mum' and risk letting an innocent man go
to the gallows?

Afternoon in the Jungle: The Selected Short Stories
of Albert Maltz — Albert Maltz.
Americans in America as it is, not as it is idealized. Without being
outright disrespectful and critical of [the U.S.], the human dramas
Maltz has written concern social problems that have not been fully resolved,
even decades after these stories were written. The spiritually impoverishing
drudgery of manual labor finds a home in a nameless town when a circus
comes. Racism threatens the life of an unborn child. Suicide erupts in
a tranquil urban setting. Corruption mars the landscape in a Southern
town. A poor child learns the destructiveness of greed when he faces
another, equally poor man one late winter afternoon. Two couples are
ruined or threatened by dangerous job conditions.

An American Mosaic: Prose and Poetry by Everyday
Folk — Robert Wolf (Editor), Bonnie
Koloc (Illustrator). Wolf helped found the nonprofit Free River Press
to publish the writings of homeless men and women. He helped nonwriters
overcome their inhibitions about writing by conducting "orally oriented" workshops.
These proved to be so successful he widened the circle to include other
groups in need of a forum, such as farm families and citizens of small
towns. The resulting poems and personal narratives are authentic, involving,
and enlightening. They do, indeed, create a mosaic, and it captures the
frustration and determination of people whose lives are constricted by
harsh economic realities. Homeless men and women write about their lives
both before and after they ended up on the streets, and rural life is
revealed in all its surprising diversity, demands, satisfactions, and
traumas. Wolf characterizes rural America and the terrain of the homeless
as a Third World country and believes that the only way things will improve
is if the stories of its people are heard.

American Sensations: Class, Empire, and
the Production of Popular Culture (American Crossroads, 9) — Shelley
Streeby. Investigates an intriguing, thrilling, and often lurid assortment
of sensational literature that was extremely popular in the United States
in 1848--including dime novels, cheap story paper literature, and journalism
for working-class Americans. Shelley Streeby uncovers themes and images
in this "literature of sensation" that reveal the profound
influence that the U.S.-Mexican War and other nineteenth-century imperial
ventures throughout the Americas had on U.S. politics and culture. Streeby's
analysis of this fascinating body of popular literature and mass culture
broadens into a sweeping demonstration of the importance of the concept
of empire for understanding U.S. history and literature.

American Working-Class Literature — Nicholas
Coles & Janet Zandy. An
Anthology. Key historical and cultural developments in working-class life.
The only book of its kind, this groundbreaking anthology includes work
not only by the industrial proletariat but also by slaves and unskilled
workers, by those who work unpaid at home, and by workers in contemporary
service industries. As diverse in race, gender, culture, and region as
America's working class itself, the selections represent a wide range
of genres including fiction, poetry, drama, memoir, oratory, journalism,
letters, oral history, and songs. Works by little-known or anonymous
authors are included alongside texts from such acclaimed writers as Frederick
Douglass, Upton Sinclair, Tillie Olsen, Philip Levine, Maxine Hong Kingston,
and Leslie Marmon Silko.

Andromeda: A Space Age Tale — Ivan
Yefremov. (1957)

Animal Farm — George
Orwell.

An Anthology of Chartist Poetry: Poetry of the British
Working Class, 1830S-1850s — Peter Scheckner.

The Armies of Labor - A Chronicle of the
Organised Wage-Earners — Samuel P. Orth. Many of the
earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before,
are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press
are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern
editions, using the original text and artwork.

Arrogant Beggar — Anzia
Yezierska. This realistic, socially conscious, occasionally overly romantic
novel by Yezierska (1880-1970) chronicles the adventures of narrator
Adele Lindner, who exposes the hypocrisy of the charitably run Hellman
Home for Working Girls (read the Clara de Hirsch Home) after fleeing
from the poverty of the Lower East Side. In the seemingly picture-perfect
institution, Adele's eyes are opened. She wants to be seen as an equal,
but her benefactress instead sees her as a servant girl, someone whose
role, she is told later, "consists in serving others." Later,
after leaving the home and founding a restaurant, Adele is able to practice
philanthropy the way she feels it should be practiced. On its publication
in 1927, this book was criticized for its sarcastic attacks on boarding
institutions. Though dated and sometimes melodramatic, particularly where
Adele's romance with her benefactress's son is concerned, the social
commentary about Jewish class and ethnic tensions still rings true. Fast-paced,
the book brings to life the teeming activity of the Lower East Side with
both passion and careful attention to detail.

Audacious Democracy: Labor, Intellectuals,
and the Social Reconstruction of America — Steven Fraser.
The labor movement-reviled, held in contempt, or ignored for a generation-is
making itself heard again. How can a newly aroused and combative labor
movement restore social justice and economic security to postmodern America?
This collection of essays by intellectuals and labor activists does nothing
less than challenge the corporate domination of American life.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Malcolm
X.

Autobiography of Mother Jones — Mary Harris
Jones. Widowed at the age of 30 when her husband and four young children
died during a yellow fever epidemic, Jones spoke tirelessly and effectively
throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries on behalf of workers'
rights and unionists, and played a significant role in organizing mining
strikes.

The Beans of Egypt,
Maine — Carolyn
Chute. Carolyn Chute is an American writer and populist
political activist strongly identified with the culture of poor, rural
western Maine. SeeWikipedia.

Beggars of Life: A Hobo Autobiography — Jim
Tully (Author), Charles Ray Willeford (Introduction). A bestseller in
1924, this vivid piece of outlaw history has inexplicably faded from
the public consciousness. Jim Tully takes us across the seamy underbelly
of pre-WWI America on freight trains, and inside hobo jungles and brothels
while narrowly averting railroad bulls (cops) and wardens of order. Written
with unflinching honesty and insight, Beggars of Life follows Tully from
his first ride at age thirteen, choosing life on the road
over a deadening job, through his teenage years of learning the ropes
of the rails and -living one meal to the next. Followed by: Circus
Parade, "a
series of none too happy and often ironical incidents with a circus";
Shanty Irish, "the background of a road-kid who becomes articulate";
Shadows of Men, "the tribulations, vagaries, and hallucinations of
men in jail"; and Blood on the Moon, "the period which led to
social adjustment. . . With it I bid farewell forever, I hope, to that
life, the winds of which equally twisted and strengthened me for the sadder
years ahead."

The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene
V. Debs — Ray Ginger, with a new introduction
by Mike Davis.
Presents "the definitive story of the life and legacy
of the most eloquent spokesperson and leader of the US labor and socialist
movements."

Betrayal of Work : How Low-wage Jobs Fail
30 Million Americans (03 Edition) — Beth Shulman. Following
its publication in hardcover, the critically acclaimed The Betrayal of
Work became one of the most influential policy books about economic life
in America; it was discussed in the pages of Newsweek, Business Week,
Fortune, the Washington Post, Newsday, and USA Today, as well as in public
policy journals and in broadcast interviews, including a one-on-one with
Bill Moyers on PBS's Now, The American Prospect's James K. Galbraith's
praise was typical: Shulman's slim and graceful book is a model combination
of compelling portraiture, common sense, and understated conviction.
Beth Shulman's powerfully argued book offers a full program to address
the injustice faced by the 30 million Americans who work full time but
do not make a living wage. As the influential Harvard Business School
newsletter put it, Shulman specifically outlines how structural changes
in the economy may be achieved, thus expanding opportunities for all
Americans. This edition includes a new afterword that intervenes in the
post-election debate by arguing that low-wage work is an urgent moral
issue of our time.

Between the Devil and the Deep
Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World,
1700-1750 — Marcus Rediker.

Between the Hills and the Sea — K.B.
Gilden. (1990) The cold war in the Connecticut labor movement.

Big Bad Love — Larry Brown. Ten
short stories "dealing with sex, with drink, with fear, with all kinds
of bad luck and obsession, these stories are unflinching and not for
the fainthearted or the easily shocked. But as is true of all Brown's
fiction, these ten stories are linked in a collected statement of redemption
and hope, a statement here illuminated by the obsession that sets man
apart from beast - the drive to communicate. Here are ten stories and
ten heroes -- heroes who share many of the same characteristics, though
not exactly the same name. Here are Leo, Lonnie, Leroy, Louis, Mr. Lawrence,
Leon... some even have the initials L.B. All ten live in rural Mississippi.
They like to drive around the back roads in pickup trucks with coolers
of beer close at hand. Their marriages aren't ideal. They frequent local
bars. They are men of few words driven to express themselves. Nine of
the stories are irreverent, brutal, and funny. In the tenth story, one
difference sets its hero apart. He is a writer. And by the end of this
book, we understand what it is that drives this writer past alcoholism,
infidelity, love, grief. His story is also irreverent and brutal, but
it is not quite so funny. Instead, it is as close to the truth as human
expression can take us."

Big Red Songbook — Archie
Green, John Neuhaus. A collection of "the potent and piquant songs that
Wobblies of many creeds and colors sang around copper mines and hobo
campfires, on picket lines and in jail." The music of the Industrial
Workers of the World.

Big Trouble — J.
Anthony Lukas. An important work about the "Trial of the Century," the
murder conspiracy trial of Western Federation of Miners (WFM) leader
Bill Haywood and two associates, who were successfully defended by Clarence
Darrow. While the book appreciates class issues, it fails
in one significant way-- it explores in depth the lives of everyone connected
with the trial except for the WFM miners. Also see The Corpse
on Boomerang Road.

Biographies Of Working Men — Grant Allen.

Bisbee '17 — Robert
Houston. (1979) About the Bisbee Deportation of 1917.

BLACK PIT — Albert Maltz. A
workers’ drama
about West Virginia miners and union organizing. The cause demands stern
sacrifices, but some turn to treachery.

Blood Red Roses — John McGrath.
Blood Red Roses explores the apathy and
misery which overtook the working-class, especially in Scotland, under
the Callaghan and Thatcher governments. The drama covers the same period
as John Mortimer's series Paradise Postponed but whereas
Mortimer explored the decline and
fall of the English middle-class, McGrath was concerned with the experience
of the Scottish working-class. The drama's central subject, the closure
of the local factory - and largest local employer - following the union
defeat of the multinational company which takes it over, was based on
a real incident in East Kilbride. Bessie is a feisty heroine, almost
too committed and brave to be true. When we first meet her, she is fighting,
and she continues
to fight everyone
she sees as an enemy, whether it is her mother's lover or the chauvinist
school minister. McGrath is concerned with sexual politics too; Bessie's
political and sexual awakening coincide, but her new husband still expects
her to stay at home to bring up the children. Her increasing trade union
involvement inevitably puts a strain on the marriage, and eventually
Bessie finds herself a single parent. Her problems worsen when she is
victimised and cannot get another job, because of her union militancy.
But she is a survivor. McGrath ends by bringing Bessie's story right
up to date, and showing her marching with her children and other mothers
at the Glasgow May Day parade, no longer alone but one of millions challenging
the old order. -Janet Moat

Blood, Sweat & Tears: The Evolution
of Work — Richard Donkin. Blood, Sweat & Tears is a captivating
history of work, from prehistoric times to the present day. It offers
fascinating and intelligent analyses of the individuals, assumptions,
theories, developments, and practices that have so much changed work.
Based on detailed research from around the world, the author examines
early societies, slavery, the guilds, the creation of trade secrets and
the influence of religion on work (such as the humanist ideals of the
great Quaker industrialists). Donkin also investigates the ideas of the
theorists, such as F. W. Taylor, Max Weber, Elton Mayo, Mary Parker Follett,
and W. Edwards Demming, and the impact they have had on our lives. And,
controversially, the author challenges the work ethic on behalf of all
those whose lives have increasingly become subsumed by the demands of
employers, asking the question: Why do we do it? Donkin challenges the
Protestant work ethic and suggests that people would lead happier lives
if they worked less.

Blue Collar Goodbyes — Sue
Doro. Honest and powerful portraits of real blue collar working people
facing imminent job loss. Doro chronicles the struggles and victories
of her life and the lives of those around her.

The Bonds of Labor: German Journeys to
the Working World, 1890-1990 (Kritik: German Literary Theory
and Cultural Studies) — Carol
Poore.

Border Country —Raymond
Williams. An academic visits his sick father, who was a railway signalman.
There are lengthy flashbacks to the 1920s and 1930s, including the General
Strike of 1926. Though fiction, it has many points in common with Raymond
Williams's own background. From Wikipedia.

Border Iron —Herbert
Best.

Bows against the Barons — Geoffrey
Trease.

Bread Givers — Anzia
Yezierska. 1975.

British Aestheticism and the Urban Working
Classes, 1870-1900: Beauty for the People (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century
Writing
and Culture) — Diana Maltz. Reveals the interdependence between
British Aestheticism and late-Victorian social reform movements. Following
John Ruskin, who believed in art's power to civilize the poor, cultural
philanthropists promulgated a Religion of Beauty as they advocated practical
schemes for tenement reform, university-settlement education, Sunday
museum opening, and High Anglican revival.

Broken Promise : Subversion of U. S. Labor
Relations Policy, 1947-1994 (95 Edition) — James A. Gross and Paula Rayman
and Cermen Sirianni. The Wagner Act of 1935 (later the Wagner-Taft-Hartley
Act of 1947) was intended to democratize vast numbers of American workplaces:
the federal government was to encourage worker organization and the substitution
of collective bargaining for employers' unilateral determination of vital
work-place matters. Yet this system of industrial democracy was never
realized; the promise was "broken." In this rare inside look
at the process of government regulation over the last forty-five years,
James A. Gross analyzes why the promise of the policy was never fulfilled.
Gross looks at how the National Labor Relations Board's (NLRB) policy-making
has been influenced by the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court,
public opinion, resistance by organized employers, the political and
economic strategies of organized labor, and the ideological dispositions
of NLRB appointees.

Brownsville: Stories — Oscar Casares. Probing underneath
the surface of Tex-Mex culture, Casares's stories, with their wisecracking,
temperamental, obsessive middle-aged men and their dramas straight from
neighborhood gossip are in the direct line of descent from Mark Twain
and Ring Lardner.

Burning Valley (Radical Novel Reconsidered) — Phillip
Bonosky. The story of a young working class boy's developing conscience
as he lives life out in a steeltown. While Benedict's dilemmas sometimes
seem a trifle precious and overwrought, the author brings the character
off in a way that endears the reader to him even while finding him sometimes
annoying. This title should be of interest to anyone who enjoyed Thomas
Bell's Out of the Furnace. It also deserves an audience from those interested
in liberation theology.

By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum
America — Nicholas K. Bromell. The spread of industrialism, the
emergence of professionalism, and the challenge to slavery fueled an
anxious debate about the meaning and value of work in antebellum America.
In chapters on Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Susan
Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass, Nicholas
Bromell argues that American writers generally sensed a deep affinity
between the mental labor of writing and such bodily labors as blacksmithing,
house building, housework, mothering, and farming.

Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working Class Camerados
— Charley Shively (Editor). About the young men whom Whitman loved,
and who loved him, beginning with Fred Vaughan, who inspired the Calamus
poems -- the cycle in which Whitman celebrates "manly attachments", "athletic
love", and the "dear love of comrades".

Camaro City — Alan Sternberg. The economic blight
that has devastated southeastern Connecticut's old industrial towns forms
the backdrop for this debut collection about the problems of blue-collar
workers in hard times. Most of Sternberg's stories are about men who build
and fix things, who "might have worked in the factories if the factories
hadn't closed." These men are concerned with keeping their jobs
and their often better-educated and better-employed wives while dealing
with problems from unruly kids to house fires. There is some diversity
of character here in the occasional professional worker or person of
color, but it is the beefy white blue-collar worker in a grittily realistic
milieu who is so keenly, almost lovingly, portrayed.

Cane — Jean Toomer. African-American poetry.

Catch-22 — Heller.

The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial
Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 — Olivier
Zunz. Originally published in 1983, The Changing Face of Inequality is
the first systematic social history of a major American city undergoing
industrialization. Zunz examines Detroit's evolution between 1880 and 1920
and discovers the ways in which ethnic and class relations profoundly altered
its urban scene.

Chartism to Trainspotting — See Working
Class Fiction.

Chicago Stories (Prairie State Books)
— James T. Farrell.

Child Labour Issues 46 — Craig Donnellan.
It is estimated that over 250 million children work for a living, 300,000
have fought in armed conflicts world-wide and each year over one million
children enter the sex trade. This book looks at the growing problem
of child exploitation and what is being done to eradicate it.

Child of the Dark — Carolina
Maria De Jesus. The diary of a Brazilian peasant who lived most of her
life in the favela (slums) of São Paulo, Brazil. See Wikipedia.

Children for Hire: The Perils of Child
Labor in the United States — Marvin J. Levine. Despite
popular belief, the problem of illegal child labor has not been remedied.
The practice persists in the United States and even appears to be increasing.
Levine, an acknowledged expert in the field, reveals the nature and magnitude
of this "old" problem in today's economy. Levine explains that
since 1981, there has been a relaxation in enforcement of federal child
labor law provisions. He presents the complicated elements and troubling
implications of a problem that has come to be ignored or overlooked in
American society, focusing especially on matters of occupational health
and safety. This book is important reading for the general public, as
well as for scholars and policymakers involved with children's and labor
issues in the United States. The United States has more of its children
in the workforce than any other developed country. They are found in
textile, jewelry, and machine shops in New York and New Jersey, in Southeast
supermarkets operating meat-cutting machines and paper-box bailers, in
Washington state selling candy door-to-door, and in farming operations
throughout the country.

Children of Other Worlds: Exploitation in the
Global Market — Jeremy
Seabrook. Examines the international exploitation of children and exposes
the hypocrisy, piety, and moral blindness that have informed much of
the debate in the West on the rights of the child. Seabrook addresses
the key question of whether the West can turn its benevolent attention
to the
evils of child labor in the rest of the world without first understanding
that gross forms of poverty anywhere are part of the same pathology.

Class (The New Critical Idiom) — Gary
Day. Traces the phenomenon of class from the medieval to the postmodern
period, examining its relevance to literary and cultural analysis today.
Drawing on historical, sociological and literary writings, Gary Day gives
an account of class at different historical moments; shows the role of
class in literary constructions of the social; examines the complex relations
between "class" and "culture"; focuses attention
on the role of class in constructions of "the literary" and "the
canon"; employs a revived and revised notion of class to critique
recent theoretical movements.

Class War: A Decade of Disorder — Ian
Bone (Author), Alan Pullen (Author), Tim Scargill (Author). This book
is about the class war federations tabloid (Class War). It contains
the history of the paper, and events surrounding it, very interesting
for anyone interested in class politics and direct action. Not much on
the deeper side of the politics, refer to their book Unfinished
Business for the politics behind the chaos. Great stories, comics,
and propaganda graphics, a must have for syndicalists and anyone into
what democracy really looks like.

The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life
Found — Don J Snyder. Snyder
was an English professor at Colgate University with books to his credit
and teaching awards, a beautiful old house which comfortably housed his
wife and four small children, and the perks and honors that normally
acrue to a successful academic. Then he was fired. The book he has written
about his subsequent two-year struggle to understand that fact is a painful
one (particularly for another academic), because it is so unflinchingly
honest. Without a trace of selfpity, Snyder describes his vain attempts
to get another teaching job, his descent into a kind of twilight of disbelief
and loss of faith in himself, and then his recovery through a stint as
a carpenter's laborer. Snyder may not be much of a carpenter, as he himself
admits, but he has written a wonderful and moving memoir." -- Daniel
Weiss

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty — Eudora
Welty. Character stories from
the southern U.S.

Common Sense and a Little Fire (95
Edition) — Annelise
Orleck. Traces the personal and
public lives of four immigrant women activists who left a lasting imprint
on American politics. Though they have rarely had more than cameo appearances
in previous histories, Rose Schneiderman, Fannia Cohn, Clara Lemlich
Shavelson, and Pauline Newman played important roles in the emergence
of organized labor, the New Deal welfare state, adult education, and
the modern women's movement. Orleck takes her four subjects from
turbulent, turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe to the radical ferment
of New York's Lower East Side and the gaslit
tenements where young workers studied together. Drawing from the women's
writings and speeches, she paints a compelling picture of housewives'
food and rent protests, of grim conditions in the garment shops, of factory-floor
friendships that laid the basis for a mass uprising of young women garment
workers, and of the impassioned rallies working women organized for suffrage.
From that era of rebellion, Orleck charts the rise of a distinctly working-class
feminism that fueled poor women's activism and shaped government labor,
tenant, and consumer policies through the early 1950s.

The Common Thread: Writings by Working Class Woman — June Burnett.

Company Woman — Kathleen
De Grave.

The Complete Short Stories of
Mark Twain Now Collected for the First Time — Mark
Twain, Charles Neider.

The Condition of the Working Class in England (World's
Classics) — Friedrich Engels (Author), David
McLellan (Editor). This, the first book written by Engels during his stay
in Manchester from 1842 to 1844, is the best known and in many ways
the best study of the working class in Victorian England.

Co-op — Upton Sinclair.

Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama — edited
by Kevin Danaher. Collection of essays by different writers on globalization,
the rise of corporate power, and the downsizing of the American Dream.
Forward by Noam Chomsky.

The Corpse on Boomerang Road — MaryJoy
Martin. Written in the style of a novel, with a significant surprise
revealed in the
early chapters, this is the account of the war against the Western Federation
of Miners in Telluride, Colorado. Adds a new perspective to the account
of the WFM leadership explored in Big Trouble.

Cranford— Elizabeth
Gaskell. Classic portrait of life in a quiet English village of the
early nineteenth century.

The Cricket in Times Square — George
Selden. A very sweet story about a cricket from Connecticut who
accidentally ends up in the subway station at Times Square. While there,
he makes some friends, and discovers that he has an amazing talent.

Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality
in American Literature and Social Thought — Michael Trask. Modern society,
Michael Trask argues in this incisive and original book, chose to couch
class difference in terms of illicit sexuality. Trask demonstrates how
sexual science’s concept of erotic perversion mediated the writing
of both literary figures and social theorists when it came to the innovative
and unsettling social arrangements of the early twentieth century.
Trask focuses on the James brothers in a critique of pragmatism and anti-immigrant
sentiment, shows the influence of behavioral psychology on Gertrude Stein’s
work, uncovers a sustained reflection on casual labor in Hart Crane’s
lyric poetry, and traces the identification of working-class Catholics
with deviant passions in Willa Cather’s fiction. Finally, Trask
examines how literary leftists borrowed the antiprostitution rhetoric
of Progressive-era reformers to protest the ascendence of consumerism
in the 1920s. Viewing class as a restless and unstable category, Trask
contends, American modernist writers appropriated sexology’s concept
of evasive, unmoored desire to account for the seismic shift in social
relations during the
Progressive era and beyond. Looking closely at the fraught ideological
space between real and perceived class differences, Cruising Modernism
discloses there a pervasive representation of sexuality as well.

CUENTOS: STORIES BY LATINAS — edited by Alma
Gómez, and Cherríe Moraga, and Mariana Romo-Carmona.
Cuentos: Stories by Latinas describe the varied experiences of Hispanic
women. Anger, love, compassion, humor and pathos fill the pages of this
collection. Most importantly, these women speak of their ability to overcome
daily struggles of survival, and prevail.

Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s — Laura Hapke

Death of a Salesman; Certain Private Conversations
in Two Acts and a Requiem — Arthur Miller.
American literary drama.

The Death Ship — B.
Traven. Describes the predicament of merchant seamen who lack documentation
of citizenship and cannot find legal residence or employment in any nation.
The narrator is Gerard Gales, an American sailor who claims to be from
New Orleans, and who is stranded in Antwerp without passport or working
papers. Unable to prove his identity or his eligibility for employment,
Gales is repeatedly arrested and deported from one country to the next,
by government officials who do not want to be bothered with either assisting
or prosecuting him. When he finally manages to find work, it is on the
Yorikke, the dangerous and decrepit ship of the title, where undocumented
workers from around the world are treated as expendable slaves. The term "death
ship" refers
to any boat so decrepit that it is worth more to its owners overinsured
and sunk than it would be
worth afloat. Due to its scathing criticism of bureaucratic authority,
nationalism, and abusive labor practices, The Death Ship is often described
as an anarchist novel. From Wikipedia.

Deliverance — James
Dickey. "My story is simple: there are bad people, monsters among us.
Deliverance is really a novel about how decent men kill, and the fact
that they get away with it raises a lot of questions about staying within
the law — whether decent people have the right (to) go outside
the law when they’re encountering human monsters. I wrote Deliverance
as a story where under the conditions of extreme violence people find
out
things about themselves that they would have no other means of knowing.
The late John Berryman…said that it bothered him more than anything
else that a man could live in this culture all his life without knowing
whether he’s a coward or not. I think it’s necessary to know.”

Detroit Tales — Jim
Ray Daniels, Jim Daniels. Michigan short stories.

Dharma Bums — Jack
Kerouac.

Dickens And Empire: Discourses Of Class,
Race And Colonialism In The Works Of Charles Dickens (Nineteenth Century) — Grace Moore.

Digger's Blues — Jim
Daniels. American poetry chapbook.

Dirty Work — Larry
Brown. "...Braiden Chaney has no arms or legs. Walter James has
no face. They lost them in Vietnam, along with other, more vital parts
of themselves. Now, twenty-two years later, these two Mississippians
-- one black, the other white -- lie in adjoining beds in a V.A. hospital.
In the course of one long night they tell each other how they came to
be what they are and what they can only dream of becoming. Their stories,
recounted in voices as distinct and indelible as those of Faulkner, add
up to the story of the war itself, and make 'Dirty Work' the most devastating
novel of its kind since Dalton Trumbo's Johnny got his gun."

The Disinherited — Jack
Conroy. (1963)

Disposable American : Layoffs and Their
Consequences (06
Edition) — Louis Uchitelle. The Disposable American is an eye-opening account of
layoffs in America — their questionable necessity, their overuse,
and their devastating impact on individuals at all income levels. Yet despite
all this, they are accelerating.

The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia —Ursula
K. Le Guin.

Distinctions of Class —Anita
Burgh.

The Dodo Bird — Manny Fried. A
play that "brings union and working class life into the
arts." -Les Fiedler

The Dogs of March — Ernest Hebert.
The story of a middle-aged mill worker who loses his job when the shop
closes. For more Hebert novels, see Wikipedia.

The Economics of Gender and Mental Illness — D.
E. Marcotte. While gender has so often been found to be an important
determinant of prevalence and outcomes of mental illness, economists
have rarely focused on gender differences as a central element of their
analyses. In this volume, we direct the focus of research in the economics
of mental health squarely on the topic of gender. Each paper in this
volume provides insight into the ways in which women and men are afflicted
and affected by mental illness in the labor market.

Educating Our Masters: Influences on the
Growth of Literacy in Victorian Working Class Children — Alec Ellis.

Empire Falls — Richard Russo. A tale of blue-collar life, which itself increasingly
resembles a kind of high-wire act performed without the benefit of any
middle-class
safety nets.

The End Of The Class War — Catherine
Brady. The 14 interlinked stories in this moving collection are beautifully
crafted
snapshots of Irish immigrants to American cities (Chicago, San Francisco)
in 1950. "It's no mercy... seeing into the insides of things, into
the secret ways by which the bones absorb shock and mend themselves..." but
Brady does it with compassion and joy. Her short fictions capture critical
moments in the lives of the working-class women who absorb shocks, mend,
go on.

Everything I
Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men About More-or-Less Gay
Life — Wendell Ricketts (Editor). Fascinating,
diverse and refreshingly unique short fiction anthology blows
apart many of the tired stereotypes of gay men that persist in Western
culture. The struggling protagonists of these stories are acutely aware,
not only of their place in the social strata, but of their status as
outsiders.
They sometimes remark on more privileged men that surround them with
frustration and contempt. But even though their working class origins
are plainly evident most of them occupy an uncomfortable grey area in
between the two worlds, for it is with an equal degree of detachment
they regard their own families and the environments they grew up in.
Fathers are often belching, farting brutes firmly planted in front of
the TV with beers in hand, while mothers are ineffectual, chain smoking,
church-ladies. The (central) characters refuse to be pigeonholed. They
come across as living, breathing individuals and thus are the strong
suit
in most
of the stories.

The Exploited Child — Bernard
Schlemmer. This investigation of child labor explores difficult conceptual
and public policy issues. It demonstrates the sheer prevalence of the
commercial exploitation of child labor in both industrial and developing
countries, and its rapid growth today under the twin pressures of mass
poverty and the globalized marketplace for labor. In addition to its
rich empirical material from countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa,
and Europe, the author makes a clear distinction between the socialization
of children through labor within the family and their economic exploitation
for profit. It also focuses on the role of adults with responsibility
for children, and the specific form which paternal domination takes towards
children.

Factory Girl: Ellen Johnston And
Working-class Poetry In Victorian Scotland (Scottish Studies International,
Vol. 23) — H.
Gustav Klaus. The first critical biography of the Glaswegian writer
who signed her poems as The Factory Girl. An essay in recovery and
exploration, situating Ellen Johnston at the intersection of gender,
class and nation. Documents her range of subjects, styles and voices.
The
book is concluded by a selection of Ellen Johnston's verse.

The Factory Girl and the Seamstress:
Imagining Gender and Class in Nineteenth Century American Fiction (Garland
Studies in
American Popular History and Culture) — Amal Amireh. Studies the
representations of working-class women in canonical and popular American
fiction between 1820 and 1870. These representations have been invisible
in nineteenth century American literary and cultural studies due to the
general view that antebellum writers did not engage with their society's
economic and social relaities. Against this view and to highlight the
cultural importance of working-class women, this study argues that, in
responding to industrialization, middle class writers such as Melville,
Hawthorne, Fern, Davies, and Phelps used the figures of the factory worker
and the seamstress to express their anxieties about unstable gender and
class identitites. These fictional representations were influenced by,
and contributed to, an important but understudied cultural debate about
wage labor, working women, and class.

Falling through the Earth : a memoir — Danielle
Trussoni. The author of Falling through the Earth is
as much a casualty of the Viet Nam war as was her father, Dan, who returned
from that war as damaged goods, a man unable to show his wife and children
that he loved them. Trussoni's benign neglect of his children forced
them to grow up tough and able to solve their own problems because he
was a firm follower of the old adage that "whatever doesn't kill
you makes you stronger." Sadly, their situation shows clearly how
the crippling aftereffects of combat can be so easily passed on from
one generation to the next.

Fay — Larry Brown. The author
writes about "the truly forgotten, the truly disenfranchised people of
this country, the impoverished
and working class white Americans of the South and Appalachia." Fay is
"a beautiful 17-year-old woman, walking out of the hills of Mississippi,
escaping the horror of attempted sexual abuse by her father, a migrant
farm worker with a penchant for drink, bad judgment, and wife beating.
FAY has only a vague idea about where she is going, having had almost
no schooling. She only knows that wherever she is going can be no worse
than what she is leaving. And as Brown reveals her home life, piece by
piece, the reader is left with the same conclusion."

Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South's Long
Revolution (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)
— Richard Godden. A persuasive account of the ways in which Faulkner’s
work rests on deeply submerged anxieties about the legacy of violently
coercive labour relations in the American South.

Fire in Our Hearts: A Study of the Portrayal of Youth
in a Selection of Post-War British Working-Class Fiction (Gothenburg
Studies in English, 51) — Ronald Paul.

Florida's Farmworkers in the Twenty-First
Century (Florida History and Culture) — Nano Riley. In
a book that combines both oral history and documentary photography, Nano
Riley and Davida Johns tell the story of Florida's farmworkers in the
21st century. Largely ignored by mainstream America, migrant laborers
often toil under adverse labor and living conditions to provide the nation's
food supply. Intimate photographs and lucid text offer a look not only
into the difficulties faced by these laborers but also into the rich
cultural heritages of their communities and the close ties of their family
life. Until now, most publications on migrant farm labor focused on California
or the Southeast in general, offering little information on conditions
particular to farmworkers in Florida. Florida's Farmworkers focuses on
the history of Florida agriculture, the unique climate, ecology, crops,
and working conditions that distinguish the situation of Florida's farm
laborers from those in other states. Organized thematically, the book
explores the issues facing these migrant workers, who are largely Hispanic,
Haitian, and from other regions of the Caribbean. Among the issues addressed
are low wages, children's problems, education, substandard living conditions,
health, pesticide exposure, and immigrant smuggling. Riley and Johns
draw attention to a labor system greatly in need of reform.

For a Living: THE POETRY OF WORK — Nicholas
Coles. Substantial collection surveys many different kinds and styles
of laboring in poems... not just work but "nonindustrial" work,
that of a short-order cook, a woman giving birth, a baseball coach, even
a scholar in pursuit of tenure.

Front Lines— Jack
Hirschman. Poetry. "Jack is a revolutionary whose poetic imagery, as well
as his politics, are born of the heart--born of knowing the full capacity
of the human spirit... He uses
the art of poetry as the greatest artisans of language do; respectful,
knowing his craft, while sharing the wisdom that just might prod us toward
creating a better world."

George Gissing, the Working Woman, And
Urban Culture — Emma Liggins.

Germinal — Zola.
Coal mining in France more than a century ago, as starving families rise
up against greed.

Giants in the Earth — O.E.
Rolvagg.
The saga of Norwegian immigrant Per Hansa, his family, and fellow settlers
in the Dakota prairie in the late 1800s. A tale of hard work and harsh
landscapes, hopes and homesickness, isolation and utter dependence on
nature's whims.

The Girls Are Coming —
Peggie Carlson.
In 1974, due to passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972,
Peggie Carlson was one of the first four women hired by Minnegasco for
a non-secretarial position. On the job, she met men who were hostile,
men who were helpful, and those who were simply confused to find women
in their midst.

Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers
in the New Economy — Barbara Ehrenreich. Women are moving around
the globe as never before. But for every female executive racking up
frequent flier miles, there are multitudes of women whose journeys go
unnoticed. Each year, millions leave third world countries to work in
the homes, nurseries, and brothels of the first world. This broad-scale
transfer of labor results in an odd displacement, in which the female
energy that flows to wealthy countries is subtracted from poor ones—easing
a “care deficit” in rich countries, while creating one back
home. Confronting a range of topics from the fate of Vietnamese mail-order
brides to the importation of Mexican nannies in Los Angeles, Global Woman
offers an original look at a world increasingly shaped by mass migration
and economic exchange.

Granny @ Work : Aging and New Technology on the
Job in America (04 Edition) — Karen E. Riggs. The advancing
age of Baby Boomers has generated an upsurge of older workers. And
as this aging workforce encounters radical technological changes, it
faces increasingly tumultuous work environments.
In "Granny @ Work," Karen E. Riggs--a renowned expert on
aging--shows how employers, software engineers, and public policy makers
are thinking about the roles older adults might play in the workplace
of the future--and asks whether those on the front lines of corporate
life are actually looking out for the interests of a graying workforce.
She also examines dominant beliefs about aging and technology as seen
in popular culture, ranging from films like Cocoon and Space Cowboys
to specialty websites and magazines aimed at older workers. "Granny @ Work" is
an impassioned comment on aging, work, and technology in American culture.
As Riggs challenges popular assumptions
with surprising research-for example, people over the age of 60 spend
more time on the Internet than people of any other age group-and trenchant
cultural critique, she forces us to confront the deeply entrenched ageism
in today's technology-driven workplace.

Granny D: You're Never Too Old to Raise
a Little Hell — Doris Haddock (Author), Dennis Burke
(Author), Bill Moyers (Foreword). Doris Haddock raised her
family during the Great Depression, and worked in a shoe factory
for twenty years. She has
spent 45 years of her life changing the things that are wrong. "In
2003 and 2004, she embarked on a 23,000 mile tour of the 'swing
states', encouraging women and the residents of poor neighborhoods
to register to vote. She walked through housing projects considered too
dangerous to visit by many, and registering voters all along her way."
--from
the Granny D website. In 2007,
she is 97 years old and not just active,
but acting for change.

Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck.

The Great Midland (Radical Novel Reconsidered) — Alexander
Saxton. Ignored by its publisher and the public (except by federal agents)
when it was first published in 1948, "The Great Midland" will
still be avoided by those who think it's no more than a novel by a Communist
writer about Communists laborers. That would be shame, since the book
is far more nuanced than the usual agitprop from the era. While several
of the main characters are indeed Communist "agitators", the
book is a multigenerational saga about American labor, racial strife,
and ethnic communities. And it's an atypically realistic love story. The plot of "The Great Midland" frequently recalls Steinbeck's
early labor novels; Saxton slyly quotes both the "in dubious battle" passage
from "Paradise Lost" and "grapes of wrath" stanza
from the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." In Saxton's book, activists
(some Communist, some not) struggle to organize Chicago railroad labor
against both the callousness of the corporate structure, the hostility
of law enforcement, and the unresponsiveness of the union. Unlike most
novels at either end of the political spectrum (such as the pro-capitalist
manifestos of Ayn Rand or the pro-labor sermonizing of "In Dubious
Battle"), "The Great Midland" does not offer easy answers,
and it does not portray its many heroes, Communist or not, as faultless.
Saxton's characters have very human failings, they often bring their
own bad luck on themselves, and the path to the utopia they envision
is fraught with danger, dashed hopes, and the potential for abuse. Unfortunately,
the same cannot be said about the bosses or the police, whose menace
approaches caricature and whose motives or personal lives are never explored.

Growing Up Poor — a literary
anthology — edited by
Robert Coles (Children of Crisis) and Randy Testa. Selected writers
whose work gives a real sense of what it means to be alive and poor in
America.

Gunsmith's Boy — Seth
Philips.

Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work — Janet
Zandy. Demonstrates through examples of working-class literature, as well
as other writings and art, how work-related injuries "collectively
attest to untold stories of labor." Research that repeatedly shows, "The
cause of death was not an unforeseen natural catastrophe, but rather unsafe
working conditions where profits took precedence over human lives." Nearly
11,000 workers are treated in emergency rooms each day, with about
200 of these workers hospitalized. Each day, thousands of employees
require time away from their jobs to recuperate, while 15 workers die from
their
injuries, and another 134 die from work-related diseases. Zandy also identifies
some basic characteristics of working-class texts. At the center of these
texts is the living experience of the workers,
as represented
by the working class. A working-class text "recognizes and resists
the transformation of the human I/we into an it—a thing, a commodity,
a working unit, a disembodied hand." Beyond affirming the working-class
experience, these texts help recover "submerged labor histories," according
to the author. The genre defies traditional structure and form, challenging
dominant assumptions about aesthetics. Another common element of working-class
writings, according to Zandy, is class consciousness, with many working-class
writers taking sides in their writing. "Their words offer hope and
model struggle." All of these characteristics are offered as an
empirical framework for discussion, rather than a strict definition. The
author does not hide her political views, which are shared by many worker
writers—the language of class oppression and labor exploitation
permeate much of this work. Zandy sees a "historicity of class experience
being inseparable from an understanding of working-class literature."

The Harbor — Ernest
Poole. (1915)

Haymarket: A Novel — Martin Duberman.

The Haymarket Tragedy — Paul
Avrich.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter — by Carson
McCullers.
The story of five isolated, lonely people, in a sleepy Southern town,
who come together in their search for expression and spiritual integration
with something greater than themselves: John Singer, a deaf mute who
moves into the Kelly family boarding house; Mick Kelly, a thirteen-year-old
tomboy who dreams of a life in music; Biff Brannon, a café owner
and recent widower; Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, the only black doctor
in town; Jake Blount, a ne'er-do-well who is torn apart by awareness
of the injustices perpetrated around him every day, but feels helpless
and impotent.

How to Tell When You're Tired: A Brief
Examination of Work — Reg
Theriault. Covers factory jobs, time-and-motion studies, accidents and
injuries on the job, black and white workers, slave and prison labor,
unions that
only add more management, and strikes versus job actions. Theriault argues
that workers do the work and so are the most familiar with how it should
be done. Industrial workers, he believes, are alienated from their work
and are not helped by the adversarial stance of capital and labor. There's
no point, he maintains, in maximizing efficiency and increasing productivity
if the only result is a higher quota at the same pay. Decrying the "warlike
tension" between workers and management that has existed since the
onset of the industrial revolution, the author concludes, "in all
work situations where the production process takes place at the expense
and denial of human values, production suffers." "...simply superb--just
the right combination of personal anecdote, philosophical reflection,
sociological commentary, old-timer's wisdom, and humor."

Human Tradition in American Labor History (04
Edition) — Eric
Arnesen. The Human Tradition in American Labor History is a comprehensive
exploration of the American working class from the colonial period to
the present. In marked contrast to most academic treatments of American
labor, this book presents history through mini-biographical portraits
of a diverse selection of workers. Focusing on the contributions of women
and minorities and using the racial and ethnic diversity of America's
working people as its starting point, The Human Tradition in American
Labor History features the most up-to-date research into the experiences
of American workers and labor activists in the broadest range of occupations
and sectors of the economy. This book encompasses all aspects of American
labor history and reveals the diversity of movements for social change,
including unionism, labor politics, and race relations.

Identity in Transition: The Images of Working-Class
Women in Social Prose of the Vormarz (North American Studies in Nineteenth-Century
German Literature) — Helen G.
Morris-Keitel.

I know why the caged
bird sings — Maya
Angelou. "Tells of the hardships she experienced in her youth,
beginning with her parents' divorce when Angelou was only three years
old. As a result of the divorce, Maya and her older brother are sent
to live with their grandmother in a small, Arkansas town. Here, she
experiences the horrors of racism and learns to hate herself for not
being white. When she is eight, Maya goes to live with her mother in
St. Louis. There, she is sexually abused by her mother's live-in boyfriend,
and is emotionally scarred by the terrible experience. Finally, after
Maya has become aware of racial prejudice and religious hypocrisy,
she begins to find her voice. Maya's mother marries a man who proves
to be a positive father figure, and the family moves to Los Angeles.
Here, Maya spends her teenage years being defiant and getting herself
into a lot of trouble. When she becomes pregnant in her senior year
of high school, however, she gains the confidence to become a strong
woman and a good mother to her child."

The Impact of Occupational Dislocation;
The American Indian Labor Force at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Native Americans) — Patricia
Kasari. This study broadens our knowledge of the relationship between
occupational prestige, family composition, and migratory patterns of
American Indians at the close of the twentieth century. Findings suggest
that although many urban Indians work in fields that offer little prestige,
reservation Indians are even more likely to have undesirable jobs,
due primarily to low educational attainment, gender affiliation, and
familial responsibilities.

In Dubious Battle — John Steinbeck.
(1936)

Industrial Valley — Ruth
McKenney. (1939)

The Intellectual Life of the British Working
Classes (Yale
Nota Bene) — Jonathan Rose.

The Iron Heel— Jack
London. Dystopian and prescient novel of fascism.

Ironweed — William
Kennedy. Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk,
has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany in a hurry after killing a scab
during a trolley workers' strike; he ran away again after accidentally — and
fatally — dropping his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back
in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying
to make peace with the ghosts of the past and present.

Israel Horovitz, Vol. II: New England Blue: 6
Plays of Working-Class Life (Contemporary American Playwrights) — Israel
Horovitz. American playwright Horovitz has produced a distinguished body
of work. These six loosely related plays (The Widow's Blind Date, Park
Your Car in Harvard Yard, Henry Lumper, North Shore Fish, Strong Man's
Weak Child, and Unexpected Tenderness) are his most recent and among
his best. They are full of fiercely accurate regional dialog and an overwhelming
spirit of time and place. His main subject in these and other plays is
life in the workplace, a record of the world of manual labor and its
cost. His characters live dehumanized existences, sometimes rising above
their travails and relieved only briefly by the warmth of human contact.
Family, competition, labor, and environment test their strength and endurance.

I Stand
Here Ironing— see Tell
Me a Riddle.

I Was Marching— Meridel
Le Sueur. Takes the reader into the heart of the 1934 Minneapolis strike.
Short story included in many collections, including Salute
to Spring and Ripening.

The Jacket—

James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class — John
Fordham.

Jarnegan — Jim
Tully. (1926) The story of a he-man who kills a man in a fight, spends
some time in jail, begins life anew on regaining freedom, drifts into
Hollywood
and becomes a successful movie director.

J.C. Prince and The Death of the Factory Child:
A Study in Victorian Working Class Literature — B.
E Maidment.

Jesus' Son : stories
— Denis Johnson. Drug addiction.

Joe— Larry
Brown. Author Brown writes about "poor Southern rednecks who exist from
day to day, from hand to mouth, in tar-paper shacks and shabby mobile
homes. Some are hard, mean and utterly lacking in moral fiber; others,
such as the eponymous protagonist, try to live with integrity and dignity
despite limited opportunities, despite the ingrained, ubiquitous habit
of drinking prodigious amounts of beer and whiskey. Joe Ransom is almost
50, newly divorced, with bitter recollections of years spent in the pen
for assaulting a police officer while drunk. A product of his time and
place, Joe is reckless, self-destructive, hard-driving, hard-drinking,
sometimes ruthless, but he is essentially kindhearted and decent. Joe
manages a crew of black laborers who poison trees for a lumber company.
When he gives a temporary job to teenage Gary Jones, part of a migratory
family so destitute the boy has never seen a toothbrush or understood
the significance of a traffic light, Joe is touched by the boy's dogged
determination to work although Gary's alcoholic, vicious, amoral father
takes the money as soon as Gary earns it. In his own laconic way Joe
acts as mentor for Gary, until, in the novel's wrenching conclusion,
fate and Joe's own stubborn morality wrench them apart."

Joe College— Tom Perrotta.
Danny has survived his working-class adolescence and moved on to rarified
air of early 1980s Yale. But he still spends
his vacations back home
in New Jersey, behind the wheel of his dad's lunch truck, pondering a
complicated love life and dodging a gang of thugs bent on muscling their
way into his dad's territory. A comic journey into the dark side of love,
class, higher education, and food service.

The Jungle — Upton
Sinclair. (1906) For nearly a century, the original version of Upton
Sinclair's classic novel has remained almost entirely unknown. When it
was published in serial form in 1905, it was a full third longer than
the censored, commercial edition published in book form the following
year. That expurgated commercial edition edited out much of the ethnic
flavor of the original, as well as some of the goriest descriptions of
the meat-packing industry and much of Sinclair's most pointed social
and political commentary.

Kellogg's Six-Hour Day (Labor and Social Change) — Benjamin
Hunnicutt. Documents the struggle of Kellogg's workers, mostly women,
who fought to keep six-hour work shifts originally instituted during
the Depression of the 1930s, and examines their part in the century-old
vision of progressively shorter hours for all workers.

L'Assommoir (Oxford World's Classics) — Émile
Zola. The story of a woman's struggle for happiness in working-class
Paris. It was a contemporary bestseller, outraged conservative critics,
and launched a passionate debate about the legitimate scope of modern
literature. At the centre of the novel stands Gervaise, who starts her
own laundry and for a time makes a success of it. But her husband Coupeau
squanders her earnings in the Assommoir, the local drinking shop, and
gradually the pair sink into poverty and squalor. L'Assommoir is the
most finely crafted of Zola's novels, and this new translation captures
not only the brutality but also the pathos of its characters' lives.
This book is a powerful indictment of nineteenth-century social conditions...

L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future
of the U.S. Labor Movement — Ruth Milkman.

Labor Divided: Race and Ethnicity in United
States Labor Struggles, 1835-1960 (Suny Series, American Labor History) — Robert
Asher. An anthology on race, ethnicity and the history of American working-
class struggles that gives substantial (and rare) attention to the
experiences of African-American, Asian, and Hispanic workers as well
as to workers from European backgrounds. The essays cover a time period
of more than a century, and consider service workers as well as factory
workers, women as well as men.

Labor's Canvas: American Working-Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s — 40 illustrations. An unusual synthesis of art and working-class history, Labor’s Canvas argues that however simplified this golden age of American worker art appears from a post-modern perspective, The New Deal’s Federal Art Project (FAP), under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), revealed important tensions. Artists saw themselves as cultural workers who had much in common with the blue-collar workforce. Yet they struggled to reconcile social protest and aesthetic distance. Their canvases, prints, and drawings registered attitudes toward laborers as bodies without minds often shared by the wider culture. In choosing a visual language to reconnect workers to the larger society, they tried to tell the worker from the work with varying success. Drawing on a wealth of social documents and visual narratives, Labor’s Canvas engages in a bold revisionism. Hapke examines how FAP iconography both chronicles and reframes working-class history. She demonstrates how the New Deal’s artistically rendered workforce history reveals the cultural contradictions about laboring people evident even in the depths of the Great Depression, not the least in the imaginations of the FAP artists themselves. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2001.

Labor's Text: The Worker in American Fiction — Laura
Hapke. Includes working class fiction.

Labor's Troubadour — Joe
Glazer. Thje singer tells
his tale simply and directly in Labor's Troubadour, published in 2001,
by the University
of Illinois Press, as part of its
series "Music in American Life." The book is both a memoir
and a chronicle of Glazer's life's work in the American Labor Movement
from the 1940s up to the present day, and it also presents, quite keenly,
the struggles of the labor force in the United States and abroad during
the last half of the 20th century.

The Language Of Gender And Class: Transformation
in the Victorian Novel — Patricia Ingham. The Language of Gender
and Class challenges widely-held assumptions about the study of the Victorian
novel. The author analyzes language as the framework for the concepts
of gender and the formations of social class, specifically, how stereotypes
of gender and class encode cultural myths that reinforce the status quo.

The Last of Her Kind — Sigrid
Nunez. Nunez's ruthlessly observed portrait of countercultural America
in the
sixties and seventies opens in 1968, when two girls meet
as roommates at Barnard College. Ann is rich and white and wants to be
neither, confiding, "I wish I had been born poor"; Georgette
has no illusions about poverty, having just escaped her depressed home
town, where "whole families drank themselves to disgrace." Georgette
finds Ann at once despicable and mesmerizing, and she's stunned — if
not entirely surprised — when, years after the end of their friendship,
Ann is arrested for killing a cop.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men : Three Tenant
Families — James
Agee. Photojournalism. Alabama, depression era.

Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class
Consciousness — Janet Zandy. This is a book about working-class
identity, consciousness, and self-determination. It offers an alternative
to middle-class assimiliation and working-class amnesia. The twenty-five
contributors use memory--both personal and collective--to show the relationship
between the uncertain economic rhythms of working-class life and the
possibilities for cultural and political agency. Manual labor and intellectual
work are connected in these multicultural autobiographies of writers,
educators, artists, political activists, musicians, and photographers
and in the cultural work--the poems, stories, photographs, lectures,
music--they produce. Illustrated with family snapshots, this collection--the
first of its kind--includes the work of a female machinist who is also
a poet, a secretary who is also a writer, a poet who worked on the assembly
line, a musician who was also a red-diaper baby, and an academic who
is recovering the working-class writing of her father. The consciousness
that is revealed in this book makes evident the value of class identity
to collective, democratic struggle.

Life in the Iron Mills — Rebecca
Harding Davis. A short story by Rebecca Harding Davis set in the factory
world of nineteenth century Wheeling, Virginia (now Wheeling, West Virginia),
appeared anonymously in April 1861 in the Atlantic Monthly where it caused
a literary sensation with
its powerful naturalism that anticipated the work of Theodore Dreiser
and Emile Zola. The story is emphatically on the side of the exploited
industrial workers, who are presented as physically stunted and mentally
dulled but fully human and capable of tragedy. From Wikipedia.

Lights and Shades of a Factory Village: A Tale
of Lowell — Norton.
"Secret incidents in the history of Lowell, Massachusetts."

Literature, Class, and Culture: An Anthology — Paul
Lauter and Ann Fitzgerald. Achieves a balance between traditional and lesser-known
writers. Presents canonical writers such as Herman Melville and William
Faulkner, and more obscure authors such as Sue Doro
and Tom Wayman. Covers various genres of writing including fiction, poetry,
essays, speeches, autobiographies, and songs. Includes information on
working-class authors. Appropriate for classroom use.

The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years
of Working-Class Writing — H. Gustav Klaus.

The Literature of Labor and the Labors
of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Cambridge Studies in
American Literature and Culture) — by Cindy Weinstein. This
book juxtaposes representations of labor in fictional texts with representations
of labor in nonfictional texts in order to trace the intersections between
aesthetic and economic discourse in nineteenth-century America. This intersection
is particularly evident in the debates about symbol and allegory, and Cindy
Weinstein contends that allegory during this period was critiqued on precisely
the same grounds as mechanized labor.

The Literature of Work: Short Stories, Essays,
and Poems by Men and Women of Business — Sheila
E. Murphy (Author), John G. Sperling (Author), John D. Murphy (Editor).

Little House in the Big Woods — Laura
Ingalls Wilder. Little House on the Prairie series.

Living My Life — Emma
Goldman.

London Labour and the London Poor— Henry
Mayhew (Author), Victor E. Neuburg (Author). originated in a series of
articles, later published in four volumes, written for the Morning Chronicle
in 1849 and 1850 when journalist Henry Mayhew was at the height of his
career. Mayhew aimed simply to report the realities of the poor from
a compassionate and practical outlook. This penetrating selection shows
how well he succeeded: the underprivileged of London become extraordinarily
and often shockingly alive.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (Contemporary
Fiction, Plume) — Alan Sillitoe. Sillitoe's sympathy for the working
class is best demonstrated in the title story, narrated by a teen resident
of a reform school whose voice vibrates with rebellion. The youth shows
a keen awareness of his position within England's rigid class structure
and has made a conscious decision to resist those whom he says have "the
whip hand" over him. Sillitoe reveals the motivation for his protagonist's
attitude in an understated but memorable scene in which the youth remembers
finding his laborer father dead, blood spilled out of his consumptive
body. The reader sees the boy's perception that his father's life has
been used up by the system. In the story's surprising final turn, the
youth -- who has become a champion runner for his school -- attempts
in his own way to turn the tables on that system.

Looking Backward — Edward
Bellamy. Utopian.

Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and
the American Working Class (Race and American Culture)— Eric
Lott. Lott (American Studies/University of Virginia) brings a mass of
obscure information and a multidisciplinary approach, interpreting the
meaning of black-face minstrelsy to the white working classes who invented
and performed it. The appropriation of black music, dance, humor, and
narratives for commercial entertainment, says Lott, expressed the deep
racial conflicts suffered by the white working classes, especially in
the North in the decades before the Civil War. Their parodies reflected
their admiration and contempt, their envy and fear, their remoteness
and--as the economy changed--their impending identification with the
dispossessed, whom they represented as absurd. In their imitation of
blacks, and in the cross-dressing that minstrelsy required, whites males
gained control over the alien and the threatening (especially black sexuality)
and changed the way they experienced themselves as men. Lott's study
ranges through folklore, history, sociology, politics, economics, psychoanalysis,
theater history, popular music, even film theory, but it's based clearly
on contemporary and technical studies of race, gender, and class: The
``stars'' of minstrelsy, Lott says, ``inaugurated an American tradition
of class abdication through gendered cross-racial immersion.'' In the
course of his analysis, Lott places Huckleberry Finn, Uncle Tom's Cabin,
and the music of Stephen Foster in new and interesting perspective, and
reveals the significance of an art form, a ritual, that has fallen into
neglect after a period of universal popularity.

Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast
London, 1870-1918— Ellen Ross. An academic book, exceptionally well researched,
but also exquisitely well written and accessible. This book shows how
motherhood
is socially constructed, in this case by class as well as by era. But
it also shows how central mothering in all its aspects (earning and spending
and caring and negotiating) was to survivial among the working poor in
industrializing England.

Making Steel — Mark Reutter. Making Steel chronicles the rise and fall of American
steel by focusing on the fateful decisions made at the world's once largest
steel mill at Sparrows Point, Maryland. Mark Reutter examines the business,
production, and daily lives of workers as corporate leaders became more
interested in their own security and enrichment than in employees, community,
or innovative technology. This edition marks the return of a classic
and features 26 pages of photos, a new preface, and afterword.

The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the
Revolutionary Atlantic — Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker.

A Man with No Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day
Laborer — Oyama Shiro (Author), Edward Fowler (Translator). In Tokyo's
San'ya district, day laborers live in crowded, smelly bunkhouses (doya)
and rise early each morning to visit the San'ya Welfare Recruiting Office,
where the competition is fierce for backbreaking work that pays paltry
wages. Oyama (a pseudonym), a college graduate who dropped out of the
corporate world at age 40, lived in San'ya for 12 years, six of them
during the 1980s "bubble economy" and six after its collapse.
At some point, he began writing down his experiences, and submitted his
manuscript to a competition "as a lark." He won, but declined
to attend the award ceremony, and continues to live on the streets of
Tokyo, albeit in a different neighborhood. He has a self-described "inability
to interact with other people," and translator Fowler acknowledges
that even among day laborers, Oyama is particularly eccentric. But the
narrative here is generally strong and engaging. To those interested
in Japanese culture, this book will surely be an intriguing look at an
obscure aspect of the culture.

Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The
Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Reencounters
With Colonialism--New Perspectives on the Americas)
— C. L. R. James. Rather than see Ahab and Ishmael as representing
respectively "totalitarian" and "American" cultural
themes as critics in the 1950's saw it, James offers a vison focused
on the Pequod and its crew. A view in which the MARINERS, RENEGADES & CASTAWAYS
of the ship were at the mercy of their Captain. In James' interpretaion
the Pequod is a factory ship and the crew are the workers. Ahab is no
longer a mere sailor but is now illustrative of a "Captain of industry."
-Michaeleve.

Masculinity and the English Working Class
in Victorian Autobiography and Fiction (Literary Criticism & Cultural Theory)
— Ying S. Lee.

The Member of the Wedding — Carson
McCullers.
Twelve-year-old Frankie falls in love with her brother's wedding, convinced
that her brother's honeymoon will be the start of her new and exciting
life of world travel and inevitable fame. A coming-of-age story full
of long summer afternoons and the shocking juxtapositions of puberty.

Men Working — John Faulkner (Author),
Trent Watts (Introduction). : A novel.

Mid-Atlantic — Taffrail.

The Middle Sister: A Novel — Bonnie Glover.

Migrant Farmworkers: Hoping for a Better Life (Proud Heritage:
The Hispanic Library) — Deborah Kent. Planting and harvesting
crops is backbreaking labor that can take its toll on the strongest of
workers. Migrant Farmworkers: Hoping for a Better Life introduces kids
to the history and struggle of the many men, women, and children of Hispanic
heritage who travel the United States in search of work and a better
life for future generations.

Migration & the International Labour Market,
1850-1939 — Tim Hatton. "Migration and the International Labour Market 1850-1939" concentrates
on the two central aspects of international migration--the forces which
cause it and its economic effect. The contributors are drawn from a wide
range of countries representing both the underdeveloped and the developed
world, each of them examining and testing the validity of migration theories
in a historical setting. In some cases migration is viewed from a comparative
perspective--an approach which is facilitated by data on internationally
comparable real wages. The authors also look at the responsiveness of migration
from different countries, international wage differentials and the degree
of international labor market integration. A number of chapters examine
the impact of migration on real wage growth and economic convergence between
original and destination countries--issues which remain at the heart of
debates over international migration policy.

Milldust and Roses: Memoirs — Larry Smith. A poetic
but bittersweet account of growing up in an eastern Ohio steel mill town.
The town's residents, like the residents of many
Mahoning Valley communities, were a varied ethnic mix from eastern and
southern Europe. . . . The first section, the most interesting of the
book, deals with his life until his graduation. Though Smith is only
59, he writes about a world that is almost gone now, a world where small
towns were still vibrant and alive.

The Misadventures of Jack the Builder — W.J.P. Holgar.
Follow Jack as he lurches between crises. This character-packed situational
comedy is a potent laughter tonic to brighten the dullest day.

Moby Dick — Herman Melville. Among
other themes — revenge, racism, and politics — Moby
Dick explores the nature of hierarchical relationships. For some, including
C.L.R. James, the work of men in one industry during the mid-19th
Century represents a working class relationship with their boss. The doomed
ship Pequod, with its full whale-processing facilities, can serve as a
symbol for the American factory
system, with
its workers being used perilously and brought to their untimely deaths,
with a mad captain of industry at the helm. See Mariners, Renegades
and Castaways.

Modern Times, Ancient Hours -
Updated and Expanded (Rev) 03 Edition— Pietro Bassom. It is a commonly
expressed view that the sickness of our society is unemployment. Less
frequently
argued is the fact that we are, at the same time, suffering from overwork.
It is even more rare to hear that the two sicknesses, unemployment and
overwork, feed off one another and jointly attack the working classes
worldwide. In Modern Times, Ancient Hours Pietro Basso argues convincingly
that the average working time of wage labourers is more intense, fast-paced,
flexible, and longer than at any period in recent history. This is true,
he posits, not only in industry and agriculture, but also, and particularly,
in the service industry. In this comprehensive survey of all the Western
countries, not just the US, he demonstrates that extraordinary work pressure
is increasing throughout. The introduction of the thirty-five-hour working
week in France notwithstanding, all the signs of a creeping deterioration
in the working lives of millions of people are explored: a reduction
in the purchasing power of wages, the mass downsizing of corporations,
the continual erosion of company and state-ensured benefits, and finally
the availability of much cheaper labour from Latin America, Asia, Africa
and eastern Europe. The only sensible response is a renewal of the working-class
struggle. Modern Times, Ancient Hours forcefully reminds us that the
human aspiration to do work that does not break the body or the spirit
is universal and deep-rooted. Workers will rise, Basso argues, if they
continue to be pushed beyond their limits.

Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers,
and the Global Apparel Industry — Jill Louise Esbenshade. Monitoring
Sweatshops offers the first comprehensive assessment of efforts to address
and improve conditions in garment factories. The author describes the
government's efforts to persuade retailers and clothing companies to
participate in private monitoring programs. She shows the different approaches
firms have taken, and the range of monitors chosen, from large accounting
companies to local non-profits. Esbenshade also shows how the efforts
of the anti-sweatshop movement forced companies to employ monitors overseas,
as well.

Moving Up or Moving on: Who Advances in the Low-Wage
Labor Market? — Fredrik Andersson. Offers a compelling argument about
how low-wage workers can achieve upward mobility, and how public policy
can facilitate the process.

The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's
Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796 — Donna Landry. Donna Landry shows how an
understanding of the remarkable but neglected careers of laboring-class
women poets in the eighteenth century provokes a reassessment of our
ideas concerning the literature of the period. Poets such as the washerwoman
Mary Collier, the milkwoman Ann Yearsley, the domestic servants Mary
Leapor and Elizabeth Hands, the dairywoman Jane Little, and the slave
Phillis Wheatley can be seen employing various methods to adapt the conventions
of polite verse for the purposes of social criticism. Historically important,
technically impressive, and aesthetically innovative, the poetic achievements
of these working class- women writers constitute an exciting literary
discovery.

Music of the Mill — Luis
J. Rodriguez. Focuses on diverse characters living, loving and just trying
to get by in the L.A. barrios over a period of 60 years. Within the multigenerational
saga of the Salcido family and its deep ties to the Nazareth Steel Mill,
Rodriguez's main character is 20-year-old Johnny, a second-generation
mill worker who tries to fight the abusive powers-that-be inside the
operation's corporate and union hierarchies. The novel hums with intensity
as Rodriguez passionately dramatizes the battle the mill's minority workers
wage against the often-violent, KKK-aligned white mill workers in the
1970s.

The Naked and the Dead — Norman Mailer.
A Pacific battleground of the Second World War, as seen through the eyes
of a single platoon. Blighted by depression, divided by their parochialism
and ethnicity, often callously used by their superiors — the survival
of democracy nonetheless rests squarely on the shoulders of this generation
of G.I.s., ordinary men called up for extraordinary duties.

Neighborhood Jobs, Race, and Skills: Urban
Unemployment and Commuting (Garland Studies in the History of American Labor) — Daniel
Immergluck. Examines the role of job proximity on neighborhood employment
rates and the propensity of residents to work close to their own neighborhoods.

The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power
in the Digital Age (Century Foundation Books) — Simon
Head. Simon Head points to information technology as the prime cause
of growing wage disparity. Many economists, technologists and business
consultants have predicted that IT would liberate the work force, bringing
self-managed work teams and decentralized decision making. Head argues
that the opposite has happened. Reengineering, a prime example of how
business processes have been computerized, has instead simplified the
work of middle and lower level employees, fenced them in with elaborate
rules, and set up digital monitoring to make sure that the rules are
obeyed. This is true even in such high-skill professions as medicine,
where decision-making software in the hands of HMO's decides the length
of a patient's stay in hospital and determines the treatments patients
will or will not receive. Head argues that these computer systems devalue
a worker's experience and skill, and subject employees to a degree of
supervision which is excessive and demeaning. The harsh and often unstable
work regime of reengineering also undermines the security of employees
and so weakens their bargaining power in the workplace.

Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell. Thought
Police. Big Brother. Orwellian. These words have entered our vocabulary
because of George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, 1984. The story of
one man's nightmare odyssey as he pursues a forbidden love affair through
a world ruled by warring states and a power structure that controls not
only information but also individual thought and memory.

The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez — John Rechy.
Amalia Gomez awakens one day and looks out her window in the barrios
of Los Angeles to see a silver cross in the sky--a sign from God. This
Mexican-American woman is always looking for the brighter side of life,
never wanting to face her real-life problems or those of her children,
friends, or neighbors. From the early morning cross in the sky to Amalia's
near murder at the end of the day, readers are given a glimpse of life
in a decaying urban environment and see from Amalia's perspective the
motivations and challenges of barrio life. Rechy, a Mexican-American
author, presents a rich portrayal of Amalia in this readable and moving
work, punctuating his work with Spanish dialog.

Next Upsurge : Labor and the New Social
Movements (03
Edition) — Dan Clawson. The U.S. labor movement may be on the verge of massive
growth, according to Dan Clawson. He argues that unions don't grow slowly
and incrementally, but rather in bursts. Even if the AFL-CIO could organize
twice as many members per year as it now does, it would take thirty years
to return to the levels of union membership that existed when Ronald Reagan
was elected president. In contrast, labor membership more than quadrupled
in the years from 1934 to 1945. For there to be a new upsurge, Clawson
asserts, labor must fuse with social movements concerned with race, gender,
and global justice. The new forms may create a labor movement that breaks
down the boundaries between "union" and "community" or
between work and family issues. Clawson finds that this is already happening
in some parts of the labor movement: labor has endorsed global justice
and opposed war in Iraq, student activists combat sweatshops, unions struggle
for immigrant rights. Innovative campaigns of this sort, Clawson shows,
create new strategies--determined by workers rather than union organizers-that
redefine the very meaning of the labor movement. "The Next Upsurge
presents a range of examples from attempts to replace "macho" unions
with more feminist models to campaigns linking labor and community issues
and attempts to establish cross-border solidarity and a living wage.

Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting by in
America — Barbara
Ehrenreich. The author worked undercover as a waitress in Florida, a housecleaner
in Maine, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk in Minnesota to examine living conditions
for the working poor. Reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety,
and generosity.

Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class
on the Neo-Colonial Terrain — Butch Lee (Author), Red Rover
(Author). “A book that should be read by anyone who gives a damn
about a non-racist, non-sexist, non-homophobic future.” [Bo Brown]. “The
transformation to a neo-colonial world has only begun, but it promises
to be as dramatic, as disorienting a change as was the original european
colonial conquest of the human race. Capitalism is again ripping apart
and reconstructing the world, and nothing will be the same. Not race,
not nation, not gender, and certainly not whatever culture you used to
have.” [from the preface] Butch and Red break it down, how it all
fits together, how to break it apart again.

Nothing in the World — Roy Kesey.

Now You See It… Stories from Cokesville,
PA — Bathsheba Monk. Seventeen dark and hilarious interwoven
short stories covering 40 years in the lives of the stories’ two
main characters, Annie Kusiak and Theresa Gojuk, who vow as young girls
to escape their dying rust belt town and reinvent themselves. http://www.bathshebamonk.com/

Off-Season City Pipe — Allison
Adelle Hedge Coke. Hedge Coke's reputation rests on her memoirs concerned
with her Native American heritage, such as the searing
and memorable Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer. Here she reveals
another identity, as a poet of the American worker — "cracker-packin'
girls" and "fieldworkers and framers like me" — in long-lined,
conversational poems full of southern swing and storytelling zest. She
captures the lives of people struggling, sometimes failing like the zoned-out
man in the Mission District who needs a "Houdini mentality to stand," but
also exulting in their strength, like the women who, "double-handed
/ popping apart plump green strings / fresh from leafy hills," can
pint after pint of produce. Though informed by the history of Indian struggle,
the poems are set more in the city than on the reservation, in places "the
BIA forgot to watch." Anyone interested in the often silenced voices
of America's working poor will appreciate these poems.

Of Mice & Men — John Steinbeck. Depression-era
American fiction.

Olly's World — Edward Bond. This
play opens in a small, working-class apartment in London, where Mike
tries to communicate with his teenage daughter, Sheila. She remains entirely
unresponsive,
and ultimately Mike commits an extreme act which lands him in prison.
Once there, Mike attempts to understand his behavior, journeying first
to the brink of self-destruction, then to reconciliation and redemption.
Meanwhile Sheila's former boyfriend Frank, now a policeman, sets out
to take vengeance on Mike. They find Olly, a young criminal, who becomes
the pawn in Mike's search for justice and Frank's for revenge. Caught in
an endless cycle of violence and retribution, slaves to a system that
grinds them down, the men and women of Olly’s Prison
strive to create a world of order and humanity amidst a society of brutality
and chaos.

On the Line — Harvey
Swados. (1990) Fictional sketches of automobile assembly-line workers.

Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race,
and Gender, 1832-1898 — Anita Levy. Exposes certain forms of middle-class power that have been
taken for granted as "common sense" and "laws of nature." Joining
an emergent tradition of cultural historians who draw on Gramsci and Foucault,
she shows how middle-class hegemony in the nineteenth century depended
on notions of gender to legitimize a culture-specific and class-specific
definition of the right and wrong ways of being human. The author examines
not only domestic fiction, particularly Emily Bront's Wuthering Heights,
but also nineteenth-century works of the human sciences, including sociological
tracts, anthropological treatises, medical texts, and psychological studies.
She finds that British intellectuals of the period produced gendered standards
of behavior that did not so much subordinate women to men as they authorized
the social class whose women met norms of "appropriate" behavior:
this class was considered to be peculiarly fit to care for other social
and cultural groups whose women were "improperly" gendered. When
Levy reads fiction against the social sciences, she demonstrates that the
history of fiction cannot be understood apart from the history of the human
sciences. Both fiction and science share common narrative strategies for
representing the "essential" female and "other women"--the
prostitute, the "primitive," and the madwoman. Only fiction,
however, represented these strategies in an idiom of everyday life that
verified "theory" and "science."

Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism,
and the Class Politics of Nature — Lance Newman. When the New England
Transcendentalists spiritualized nature, they were reacting to intense
class conflict in the region's industrializing cities. Their goal was
to find a secular foundation for their social authority as an intellectual
elite. Our Common Dwelling engages with works by William Wordsworth,
Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and others. The works of these great authors, interpreted
in historical context, show that both environmental exploitation and
conscious love of nature co-evolved as part of the historical development
of American capitalism.

Out of the Furnace — Thomas Bell. (1976)
A Slovak-Hungarian immigrant family (three generations who
worked in the steelmills
in Braddock - PA. Bell based this book on the immigrant experiences
of his own family. He tells the story not just of this immigrant family
but of the process of unionization of the steel industry.

The Oxford Book of Work — Reference and
anthology.

Parable of the Sower — Octavia Butler.

People From the Backwoods: A novel (The
Working class in Soviet literature) — Aleksandr Malyshkin.

Philadelphia Fire — John Edgar
Wideman.

Pioneering: Poems from the Construction Site — Susan
Eisenberg. "The poems speak with a voice that is by turns dangerous and
exhilarating, rich with metaphors and unrelentingly physical--much like
construction work itself."

The Pittsburgh Cycle — August Wilson.
Wilson's "Pittsburgh Cycle" consists of ten plays—nine
of which are set in Pittsburgh's Hill District, an African-American neighorhood
that takes on a mythic literary significance. The plays are each set
in a different decade and aim to sketch the Black experience in the 20th
century. See Wikipedia.

The Politics of Turmoil; Essays on Poverty, Race, and
the Urban Crisis — Richard A. Cloward.

The Politics of Whiteness — Michelle
Brattain. Brattain (history, Georgia State U.) examines the textile industry
in Rome, Georgia from the 1930s to the 1970s, and finds that white workers
there had considerable collective political and social power, and supported
each other in working-class conservative activism against civil rights.
She traces how the textile industry offered one of the few alternatives
to agricultural work for the working class in the South, how they protected
their jobs more or less collectively. She also describes how labor unions
both hit and missed the mark amongst whites during the Depression and
after World War II, and how Rome eventually went Republican in the face
of civil rights.

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail— Richard A. Cloward. Have the poor fared best
by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in
mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating
The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they
examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class
groups in 20th century America: -- The mobilization of the unemployed
during the Great Depression that gave rise to the Workers' Alliance of
America -- The industrial strikes that resulted in the formation of the
CIO -- The Southern Civil Rights Movement -- The movement of welfare
recipients led by the National Welfare Rights Organization.

Poor Workers' Unions : Rebuilding Labor
From Below (05 Edition) — Vanessa Tait. "While
the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions desperately try to figure out
how to
rebuild and energize the labor movement, this exceptional book reveals
that poor workers have been showing the way for the past forty years.
Utilizing original documents, Tait examines . . . a wide range of movements
organized by poor workers to improve their circumstances and build a
more just society, including the Revolutionary Union Movement, the National
Welfare Rights Organization, ACORN's Unite Labor Unions, workfare unions,
and independent workers'centers. She demonstrates that these movements
were founded and developed upon principles of rank-and-file control,
democracy, community involvement, and solidarity and aimed to improve
all aspects of workers' lives. . . . Both labor activists and labor historians
will learn much from this book."-Michael Yates

The Power
of Privilege — Joseph Soares. Not about the working class,
but rather an investigation of the elite privilege that reproduces the
ruling
class. Kim Martineau of the Hartford Couranthas
written about today's college admissions that,
"...the system no longer screens out Jews but has done remarkably well
at leaving the poor and working class outside the gates..."

The book The Power of Privilege "...clarifies
the dynamics of elite reproduction, shows how privilege
and
social inequality
are deeply
embedded in institutions, and demonstrates the important role that
meritocratic schools plays in society.” —Judith
Blau

PRIVATE HICKS — Albert Maltz.
One act play about a working-class soldier (National Guard) who
refuses to shoot at strikers at an unnamed
Midwest factory. A great short play with eight characters. (1935)

Punching Out — Jim Daniels.
African American Life (Poetry, paperback).

The Ragged
Trousered Philanthropists — Robert Tressell. Set
against the Free Trade Tariff Reform bills in a Sussex seaside
town, early nineteen-hundreds.

A Raisin in the Sun — Lorraine
Hansberry. The play debuted on Broadway in 1959. The story is based upon
Hansberry's own experiences growing up in Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood.
A Raisin
in the Sun was the first play written by a black woman to be produced
on Broadway, as well as the first play with a black director (Lloyd Richards)
on Broadway. From Wikipedia.

Ramparts of Resistance: Why Workers Lost
Their Power and How to Get It Back — by Sheila Cohen.

The Rat Pit (Working Class Biography) — Patrick
MacGill. The Rat-Pit tells the tragic story of the struggle of Donegal
girl, Norah Ryan against poverty in turn-of-the-century Glasgow. The
book's appearance proved deeply divisive due to its fierce anticlericalism
and unflinching portrayal of social conditions in the early years of
the century. In the intervening years it has lost none of its power
to shock. Published in 1915, Children of the Dead End was MacGill's autobiographical
novel of his childhood in Ireland and later Scotland. The Rat Pit was
a semisequel that told the story of protagonist Norah Ryan, who is
forced
into the harshest of lives. Both volumes reveal the poverty and oppression
suffered by Irish immigrants in Britain and the near slave conditions
in which they toiled as laborers.

The Ravenmaster's secret : escape from the Tower
of London — Elvira Woodruff. Workmanlike,
engaging story of the son of the ravenmaster of the Tower of London who
becomes involved in caring for the daughter of a Scottish Rebel who is
imprisoned there. He is forced to decide where his loyalties truly lie.
A secondary story involves a ratcatcher's boy who becomes a chimney sweep.
A good sense of period.

A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader —Jean
Pfaelzer. A selection of stories and nonfiction essays. Davis inherited
the sentimental literary tradition (of the latter half of the 1800s)
but nonetheless wrote "common
stories" that "exposed the tension between sentimentalism,
a genre predicated on the repression of the self, and realism, a genre
predicated on the search for individual identity." Also
see
Life in the Iron Mills.

Regulating The Poor:
The Functions of Public Relief — Richard A. Cloward

Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare —
Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward

Representations of Working Class Life,
1957-64 — Stuart Laing.

Return to Wigan — Clancy
Sigal.

Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class
Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory — Kevin
Murphy. The most thorough
investigation to date of working-class life during the revolutionary
era (1917).

Rewriting White: Race, Class, and Cultural
Capital in Nineteenth-Century America — Todd
Vogel. Looks at how America has racialized language and aesthetic achievement.
To make his point, he showcases the surprisingly complex interactions
between four nineteenth-century writers of color and the "standard
white English" they adapted for their own moral, political, and
social ends. The African American, Native American, and Chinese American
writers Vogel discusses delivered their messages in a manner that simultaneously
demonstrated their command of the dominant discourse of their times—using
styles and addressing forums considered above their station—and
fashioned a subversive meaning in the very act of that demonstration.
The close readings and meticulous archival research in ReWriting White
upend our conventional expectations, enrich our understanding of the
dynamics of hegemony and cultural struggle, and contribute to the efforts
of other cutting-edge contemporary scholars to chip away at the walls
of racial segregation that have for too long defined and defaced the
landscape of American literary and cultural studies.

The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity
and Class Conflict, 1880-1917 — Meredith
Tax. Focusing on the socialist housewives, settlement workers, and left-wing
feminists who were the main allies of working women between the 1880s
and World War I, The Rising of the Women explores the successes and failures
of the "united fronts" within which middle- and working-class
American women worked together to improve social and economic conditions
for female laborers. Through detailed studies of the Illinois Women's
Alliance, the Woman's Trade Union League, the New York shirtwaist makers
strike of 1909-10,
and the 1912 textile workers strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Meredith
Tax uncovers the circumstances that helped and hindered cross-class and
cross-gender cooperation on behalf of women of the working class. In
a new introduction to this first Illinois paperback edition, Tax assesses
the progress of women's solidarity since the book's original publication.

Rivethead : Tales From the Assembly Line (91 Edition) — Ben
Hamper. The man the Detroit Free Press calls "a blue collar Tom
Wolfe" delivers a full-barreled blast of truth and gritty reality
in Rivethead, a no-holds-barred journey through the belly of the American
industrial beast.

River: A Novel (Working Class in Soviet Literature) — Leonid
Leonov.

Rivington Street — Meredith
Tax. (1982) See Union Square.

The Road to Wigan Pier — George
Orwell. Orwell brings his unparalleled powers of observation to portray
the wretched conditions of the working class... A first-person account
of the lives of coal miners and others in the poor north of England.
See Wikipedia.

Ruined City — Nevil
Shute.

Sailors Of Cattaro — Friedrich
Wolf. A play with a battleship setting that emphasized the need for centralized
direction in a Communist organization.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning — Alan
Sillitoe. A working class man in northern England, Sillitoe bring to
life the way it used to be. Between cups of tea, Woodbines,
too many pints for sobriety and a long list of ladies, our man Arthur
spends his days in mindless bicycle manufacture and his nights forgetting
it all. There is the smell of coal smoke in the winter air, the taste
and crunch of fried bread and bacon, the scent of a woman and the hard
reality of no exit. Arthur came from a family who had spent too many
years on the dole, a situation now repreating itself in England. Prosperity
was a full larder and an endless supply of cigarettes and new clothes.
Sillitoe has captured it all in a book which still breathes the life
he infused into it almost 40 years ago.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning:
Time and the Working Classes — John Rule.
Content unknown.

Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Ireland [ILLUSTRATED] — Terry
Eagleton. Account of Ireland's neglected "national" intellectuals,
an extraordinary group, including such figures as Oscar Wilde's father
William Wilde, Charles Lever, Samuel Ferguson, Isaac Butt, Sheridan Le
Fanu. They formed a kind of Irish version of "Bloomsbury",
but one composed, exceptionally, of scientists, mathematicians, economists,
and lawyers, rather than preponderantly of artists and critics. Their
work, much of it published in the pages of the Dublin University Magazine,
was deeply caught up in networks of kinship, shared cultural interests
and intersecting biographies in the outsized village of nineteenth-century
Dublin. Eagleton explores the preoccupations of this remarkable community,
in all its fascinating ferment and diversity, through the lens of Antonio
Gramsci's definitions of "traditional" and "organic" intellectuals,
and maps the nature of its relation to the Young Ireland movement, combining
his account with some reflections on intellectual work in general and
its place in political life.

Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle
for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart — Liza Featherstone. This
book is about much more than one company's mistreatment of its employees.
It is about
the history of the female working poor, and the impossible situation
facing America's low-wage women workers. Fifteen percent of American
women hold the kind of jobs Barbara Ehrenreich described in Nickel and
Dimed, and their lives are impacted by the combination of sexism, low-wage
work and poverty that is so evident in the story of Dukes. In the ongoing
welfare reform debate, we are often told that a job — any job — is
the ticket out of poverty and welfare dependence. But in fact, as Featherstone
shows, dead-end jobs like those at Wal-Mart actually sustain poverty.
Drawing extensively on interviews with the plaintiffs, the book shows
how sex-discrimination in employment contributes to keeping women poor.
The work being done by Betty Dukes and other like her, to reform and
unionize Wal-Mart, offers hope for the future, and Featherstone reveals
the creative solutions workers around the country have found — like
fighting for unions, living wage ordinances, and childcare options.

Sent For You Yesterday — John
Edgar Wideman.

The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from
Below — Bruce
W. Robbins. examines the representation of servants in nineteenth-century
British fiction. Wandering in the margins of these texts that are not
about them, servants are visible only as anachronistic appendages to
their masters and as functions of traditional narrative form. Yet their
persistence, Robbins argues, signals more than the absence of the "ordinary
people" they are taken to represent. Robbins's argument offers a
new and distinctive approach to the literary analysis of class, while
it also bodies forth a revisionist counterpolitics to the realist tradition
from Homer to Virginia Woolf.

Sex Worker Union Organizing: An International
Study — Gregor Gall.
Sex Worker Union Organising is the first study of the emerging phenomenon
of sex workers - prostitutes, exotic dancers such as lap dancers, porn
models and actresses, and sex chatline workers - asserting that their economic
activites are work and as such, they are entitled to workers' rights. The
most developed instances of this struggle, in Australia, Britain, Canada,
Germany The Netherlands, New Zealand and the US, have taken the form of
unionisation. The book analyses the basis and contexts for this struggle
and assesses the opportunities and challenges facing these unionisation
projects.

Shut Up Shut Down — Mark
Nowak. The deindustrialization of these rust-belt cities, and the resulting
economic impact on workers' lives, is one of the recurring themes of
Nowak's poetry. He splices together newspaper quotes, photographs, song
lyrics, and numerous other artifacts, as well as his own words, to create
a collage of class struggle. The influences he cites are more often musical--Afrika
Bambaataa, Negativeland--than literary. His goal is to create a radical,
working-class literature that will speak to people who don't normally
attend academic conferences or scrutinize poetry journals.

Signed With Their Honour — James
Aldridge. War in Greece and Crete or Cyprus.

Silences — Tillie
Olsen. Explores the many ways the creative spirit, especially in those
disadvantaged by gender, class and race, can be silenced. Olsen recounts
the torments of Melville, the crushing weight of criticism on Thomas
Hardy, the shame that brought Willa Cather to a dead halt, and struggles
of Virginia Woolf, Olsen's heroine and greatest exemplar of a writer
who confronted the forces that would silence her.

The Silent Majority: A study of
the working class in post-war British fiction (Vision critical studies) — Nigel
Gray.

Singlejack Solidarity (Critical
American Studies Series) — Stan Weir. This volume collects 38 essays
by rank and file labor activist and writer Weir (1921-2001). The essays
describe his experiences as an activist in the longshore and automotive
industries, explore labor and union culture, analyze the human costs
of automation, consider the need and proper forms of working class networks,
attack the concept of the "vanguard party," present a rank
and file alternative to the business unionism of the AFL-CIO, and other
issues of the history and future directions of labor.

Sin Patron: Stories from Argentina's Worker-Run
Factories — the lavaca collective, foreword by Naomi
Klein and Avi Lewis. The worker-run factories of Argentina offer an
inspirational example of a struggle for social change that has achieved
a real victory against corporate globalization.

Slaughterhouse Five — Kurt
Vonnegut. (-)

Small Books and Pleasant Histories — by
Margaret Spufford. Examines both the spread of reading ability, and one
of the principal forms of cheap print available in the late seventeenth
century at a price within the reach of the day labourer. Many historians,
notably history of education specialists, had not realized the extent
of elementary schooling and the consequent existence of a mass readership
and a popular literature created especially for it before the Charity
School movement.

So Long, See You Tomorrow — William
Maxwell. American fiction, Illinois.

Sounder — William
H. Armstrong.

The Space Merchants — Pohl & Kornbluth.
(1953)

The Specialist — Sayles.

Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making
of the New Negro — Barbara Foley.
With the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s was
a landmark decade in African American political and cultural history,
characterized by an upsurge in racial awareness and artistic creativity.
In Spectres of 1919 Barbara Foley traces the origins of this revolutionary
era to the turbulent year 1919, identifying the events and trends in
American society that spurred the black community to action and examining
the forms that action took as it evolved.
Unlike prior studies of the Harlem Renaissance, which see 1919 as significant
mostly because of the geographic migrations of blacks to the North, Spectres
of 1919 looks at that year as the political crucible in which the radicalism
of the 1920s was forged. World War I and the Russian Revolution profoundly
reshaped the American social landscape, with progressive reforms first
halted and then reversed
in the name of anti-Bolshevism. Dissent was stifled as labor activists
and minority groups came under intense attack. Foley shows that African
Americans had a significant relationship with the organized Left and
that the New Negro movement's radical politics of race was also the politics
of class.

The Spirit of Labor —Hutchins
Hapgood. This non-fiction narrative is an entertaining look at labor
struggles, anarchist politics, and proletarian culture in Chicago, the
heart of the radical labor movement in the turn-of-the-century United
States. Through the story of its central character, anarchist carpenter
Anton Johannsen, The Spirit of Labor pulls the reader into a vibrant,
gritty world inhabited by unionists and scabs, anarchists and socialists,
hoboes and tramps, radical reformers, shady politicians and corrupt policemen,
workers equipped with "ready fists and honest souls," and by
business leaders bent on crushing the city's militant labor movement.
The book also reflects the uncomfortable fit between the worlds of the
bohemian intellectual and the radical worker.

The Stamp of Class: Reflections on
Poetry and Social Class — Gary Lenhart. The essays in The Stamp of
Class deal with the question of class as reflected in the works of
Tracie Morris, Tillie Olsen, Melvin Tolson, William Carlos Williams,
Walt Whitman, and others. The work is rooted in the author's own experiences
as a working-class poet and teacher and is the result of more than
a decade of exploration.

The Star Rover — see
The Jacket.

Starving Amidst Too Much & Other Iww
Writings on the Food Industry — Peter
(edt) Rachleff. This is a book about the irrepressible conflict between
the poorly paid workers who actually feed the world and the parasitical
multi-billionaire corporate powers that make the rules and graba the
profits. Reproduced here are rare classic documents on the "food
question" by four old-time members of the IWW. T-Bone Slim provides
a detailed critique of the industry - chockful of penetrating insight
and knckout black humor. Organizer L S Chumley portrays the horrid living
and working conditions of hotel and restaurant workers circa 1918, stressing
the need for workers' direct action. Wobbly troubadour Jim Semour, with
his inspired saga of "The Dishwasher" reflects on the possibilities
of a radically different diet. Jack Sheridan's fascinating 1959 survey
of the role of food in ancient and modern civilization, especially in
economic development, is also a crash-course in the materialist conception
of history at its Wobbly soapboxer best. In his introduction, historian/activist
Peter Rachleff traces the history of the food-workers' self-organization,
and brings the book up to date with a look at current point-of-production
struggles to break the haughty power of an ecocidal agribusiness and
the union-busting fast-food chains. Plus a foreword by Carlos Cortez.

Steady Eddie: A Novel
— T.
Glen Coughlin. The poignant angst of a 1970s teenager who dreams of escaping
his dead-end life and sailing off to Florida in his grandfather's fishing
boat. Although the reader sympathizes with Eddie's struggles about whether
he should flee the law, this gritty, melodramatic, Bukowski-like tale
loses steam when it solves Eddie's problems with a feel-good ending.

Stevedore — Paul
Peters & George Sklar. "Black and white
workers should and could present a united front." Innocent black union
organizer is accused of rape, then is railroaded because he insists on
his rights. Propaganda gives way to rousing action.

STREET: Poems by Jim Daniels, Photographs by Charlee
Brodsky — Jim
Daniels (Author), Charlee Brodsky (Photographer). Photographs shot by Brodsky
in the 1980s of people in Pittsburgh's neighborhoods, each accompanied
by a poem written by Daniels that tells the imagined story of the person
pictured.

The Struggle for the Health and Legal Protection
of Farm Workers: El Cortito (Hispanic Civil Rights) — Maurice
Jourdane. This book chronicles Jourdane's decade-long struggle to advocate
for a state ban of the short hoe and his efforts to protect other civil
and human rights of California field workers.

Studs Lonigan — James
T. Farrell (Author), Ann Douglas (Introduction). Studs starts out his life
full of vigor and ambition, qualities that are crushed by the Chicago youth's
limited social and economic environment. Studs's swaggering and vicious
comrades, his narrow family, and his educational and religious background
lead him to a life of futile dissipation.

Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism
in the United States — Sharon Smith. Workers
in the United States have a rich tradition of fighting back and achieving
gains previously thought unthinkable, from the weekend, to health care,
to the right to even form a union.
But in 2005, the number of workers organized in unions reached a 100-year
low in both the public and private sectors, even though more and more
people would like the protection of a union, and real wages for most
workers have stagnated or declined since the early 1970s. Smith explores
how the connection between the US labor movement and the Democratic Party,
with its extensive corporate ties, has repeatedly
held back working-class struggles. And she closely examines the role
of the labor movement in the 2004 presidential election, tracing the
shrinking electoral influence of organized labor and the failure of labor-management
cooperation, "business unionism,"and reliance on the Democrats
to deliver any real gains. Smith shows how a return to the fighting traditions
of US labor history, with their emphasis on rank-and-file strategies
for change, can turn
around the labor movement. Subterranean Fire brings working-class history
to light and reveals its lessons for today.

Suburban Sweatshops : Fight for Immigrant
Rights (05 Edition)— Jennifer Gordon. The author weaves
together Latino immigrant life and legal activism to tell the unexpected
tale of how the most vulnerable workers in society came together to demand
fair wages, safe working conditions, and respect from employers. Immigrant
workers--many undocumented--won a series of remarkable victories, including
a raise of thirty percent for day laborers and a domestic workers' bill
of rights. In the process, they transformed themselves into effective
political participants. Gordon neither ignores the obstacles faced by
such grassroots organizations nor underestimates their very real potential
for fundamental change. This
revelatory work challenges widely held beliefs about the powerlessness
of immigrant workers, what a union should be, and what constitutes effective
lawyering. It opens up exciting new possibilities for labor organizing,
community building, participatory democracy, legal strategies, and social
justice.

Superman: Red Son (a graphic novel) — Mark
Millar. (2004)

Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea — Laura Hapke. Arguing that the sweatshop is as American as apple pie,
Laura Hapke surveys over a century and a half of the language, verbal
and pictorial, in which the sweatshop has been imagined and its stories
told. Not seeking a formal definition of the sort that policymakers are
concerned with, nor intending to provide a strict historical chronology,
this unique book shows, rather, how the "real" sweatshop has
become intertwined with the "invented" sweatshop of our national
imagination, and how this mixture of rhetoric and myth has endowed American
sweatshops with rich and complex cultural meaning. Hapke uncovers a wide
variety of tales and images that writers, artists, social scientists,
reformers, and workers themselves have told about "the shop." Adding
an important perspective to historical and economic approaches, Sweatshop
draws on sources from antebellum journalism, Progressive era surveys,
modern movies, and anti-sweatshop websites. Illustrated chapters detail
how the shop has been a facilitator of assimilation, a promoter of upward
mobility, the epitome of exploitation, a site of ethnic memory, a venue
for political protest, and an expression of twentieth-century managerial
narratives. An important contribution to the real and imagined history
of garment industry exploitation, this book provides a valuable new context
for understanding contemporary sweatshops that now represent the worst
expression of an unregulated global economy. Rutgers UP, 2004.

Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Historical
and Global Perspective — Daniel Bender. For over a century,
the sweatshop has evoked outrage and moral repugnance. Once cast as a
type of dangerous and immoral garment factory brought to American shores
by European immigrants, today the sweatshop is reviled as emblematic
of the abuses of an unregulated global economy. This collection unites
some of the best recent work in the interdisciplinary field of "sweatshop
studies." It examines changing understandings of the roots and problems
of the sweatshop, and explores how the history of the American sweatshop
is inexorably intertwined with global migration of capital, labor, ideas
and goods. The American sweatshop may be located abroad but remains bound
to the United States through ties of fashion, politics, labor and economics.
The global character of the American sweatshop has presented a barrier
to unionization and regulation. Anti-sweatshop campaigns have often focused
on local organizing and national regulation while the sweatshop remains
global. Thus, the epitaph for the sweatshop has frequently been written
and re-written by unionists, reformers, activists and politicians. So,
too, have they mourned its return.

Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take
on the Global Factory — Miriam Ching
Louie. Showcases immigrant women workers speaking out for themselves,
in their own words. While public outrage over sweatshops builds in intensity,
this book shows us who these workers really are and how they are leading
campaigns to fight for their rights.
In-depth, accessible analyses of the immigration, labor, and trade policies,
which together have forced these women into the most dangerous, poorly
paid jobs.

The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century
America — Amy
Schrager Lang. Explores the literary expression of the crisis of social
classification that occupied U.S. public discourse in the wake of the
European revolutions of 1848. Lacking a native language for expressing
class differences, American writers struggled to find social taxonomies
able to capture--and manage--increasingly apparent inequalities of
wealth and power. As new social types emerged at midcentury and, with
them, new narratives of success and failure, police and reformers alarmed
the public with stories of the rise and proliferation of the "dangerous
classes." At the same time, novelists as different as Maria Cummins,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Horatio
Alger Jr. focused their attention on dense engagements across the lines
of class. Turning to the middle-class idea of "home" as a
figure for social harmony and to the lexicons of race and gender in
their effort to devise a syntax for the representation of class, these
writers worked to solve the puzzle of inequity in their putatively
classless nation. This study charts the kaleidoscopic substitution
of terms through which they rendered class distinctions and follows
these renderings as they circulated in and through a wider cultural
discourse about the dangers of class conflict... A finely achieved
study of the operation of class in nineteenth-century American fiction--and
of its entanglements with the languages of race and gender.

Take My Word: Autobiographical Innovations of
Ethnic American Working Women — Anne E. Goldman. Demonstrates
that ethnic women can and do speak for themselves, even in the most
unlikely contexts. Citing a wide variety of nontraditional texts--including
the cookbooks of Nuevo Mexicanas, African American memoirs of midwifery
and healing, and Jewish women's histories of the garment industry--Goldman
illustrates how American women have asserted their ethnic identities
and made their voices heard over and sometimes against the interests
of publishers, editors, and readers. While the dominant culture has
interpreted works of ethnic literature as representative of a people
rather than an individual, the working women of this study insist upon
their own agency in narrating rich and complicated self-portraits.

Talking to Strangers — Patricia
Dobler. Britingham
Prize in Poetry.

Tell Me a Riddle — Tillie
Olsen. [This collection of four stories, "I Stand Here Ironing," "Hey
Sailor, what Ship?," "O Yes," and "Tell me a Riddle," had
become an American classic. Since the title novella won the O. Henry Award
in 1961, the stories have been anthologized over a hundred times, made
into three films, translated into thirteen languages, and - most important
- once read, they abide in the hearts of their readers.] --publisher. In "I
Stand Here Ironing," a working-class
mother,
as she is doing her family's ironing, muses about how her college-age
daughter is deserving of a life of possibilities just as much as are the
daughters of families of privilege. "Hey Sailor, What Ship" is
the most powerful, concentrated portrayal of alcoholism... Excerpts
of comments at Amazon: "...Tillie Olsen packs a lifetime of enforced
silences into this slender work of art. These are dense and poetic evocations
of Joyce and Woolf, but with an added proletarian knife-thrust to the heart..." "...stories
that are so powerful, and so well-written, you'll want to read them again
and again..."

Ten Days That Shook The World— John
Reed.

The Tiger Rising— Kate
DiCamillo. Includes a child whose mother has died, and a child whose
parents have divorced. The children learn to let their "tigers" rise;
to bring expression to their fears and losses; to bring about change
in their lives, understanding that they must do so for themselves.

They Came Like Swallows — William
Maxwell.

Things Fall Apart — Chinua
Achebe. Traces the growing friction between village leaders and Europeans
determined to save the
heathen souls of Africa. But its hero, a noble man who is driven by destructive
forces, speaks a universal tongue.

Trash — Dorothy Allison.
In 14 gritty, intimate stories, Allison's fictional persona exposes with
poetic frankness the complexities of being "a
cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language, and
hope," rebelling against the Southern "poor white trash" roots
that inevitably define her. By the author of the
National Book Award finalist Bastard Out of Carolina.

Triangle — Katherine
Weber. Different views exist about the Triangle Waist Factory fire.
This novel explores the memories of a survivor and asks: who owns history
and who decides how to tell its stories? Do we inevitably interpret
history according
to
our
own
generation’s
lenses? The novel invites and rewards careful reading, as revelation comes
not in grandiose moments of high drama but through the slow accumulation
of detail.

Triangle Factory Fire Project — Chris
Piehler. A play. In the Triangle Waist Factory off downtown Manhattan’s
Washington Square—where 500 immigrant workers from Poland, Russia
and Italy toil fourteen-hour days making lady’s dresses—a cigarette
is tossed into a bin of fabric scraps. Despite desperate efforts, flames
sweep through the eighth, ninth and tenth floors. Panic-stricken workers
run in all directions. On the ninth floor, some make it to the fire escape,
only to have it collapse beneath their weight. Others run to the exit door
but find it locked—many, including the soon-to-be-married Margaret
Schwartz, die with their hands on the doorknob. Dozens leap from the windows
to their deaths, shocking the crowd of onlookers gathered below. And some
through bravery or sheer luck make it out alive. In the space of twenty-eight
minutes, the fire is under control, but 146 people, mainly young immigrant
girls, have died. THE TRIANGLE FACTORY FIRE PROJECT uses eyewitness accounts,
court transcripts and other archival material to create a dramatic moment-by-moment
account of this historic fire and the social upheaval that followed. (2005)

Triangle : the Fire that Changed America — Dave
Von Drehle. Includes information from the long-lost transcript of the
trial of the company's owner. The transcript included testimony from
several dozen individuals associated with the incident.

Twentieth-Century Writing and the British Working Class — John Kirk. Drawing extensively on
the theoretical insights of Raymond Williams and the British cultural
studies tradition to challenge suggestions that class is no longer relevant
for literary analysis, this book examines how the lives and experiences
of working-class people have changed over the past century and how these
changes have been depicted and explored in a range of fictional and nonfictional
texts.

The Underdogs — Mariano Azuela.
A first-hand description of combat during the Mexican revolution. See Wikipedia.

Union Dues: A Novel — John Sayles. The setting is Boston,
Fall 1969. Radical groups plot revolution, runaway kids prowl the streets,
cops are at their wits end, and work is hard to get, even for hookers.
Hobie McNutt, a seventeen year old runaway from West Virginia drifts into
a commune of young revolutionaries. It's a warm, dry place, and the girls
are very available. But Hobie becomes involved in an increasingly vicious
struggle for power in the group, and in the mounting violence of their
political actions.
His father Hunter, who has been involved in a brave and dangerous campaign
to unseat a corrupt union president in the coal miners union, leaves West
Virginia to hunt for his runaway son. To make ends meet, he takes day-labor
jobs in order to survive while searching for him. Living parallel lives,
their destinies ultimately movingly collide in this sprawling classic of
radicalism across the generations, in the vein
of Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, and Richard Price.

Union Square — Meredith
Tax. Rivington Street follows the lives of four Jewish women on Manhattan's
Lower East Side at the turn of the century as they encounter love, politics,
and the working world. Union Square recounts the story of several women
in the United States and Europe between the world wars. Originally released
in 1982 and 1988, respectively, this duo is probably more for feminist
readers.

Union Street & Blow Your
House Down (two novels in
one) — Pat
Barker. "[Union Street]'s point is life, and how rich and hard it
is, and the different ways people have of toughing it through the pain
without being crushed." --Meredith Tax

The Unmaking of the American Working Class — Reg
Theriault. Describes the blue-collar culture and ethics that have defined
America, and explains why they are worth preserving in the face of globalization
and downsizing. The Unmaking of the American Working Class tells the story
behind the disappearance of blue-collar work in America, giving both a
humorous
picture of working-class labor and a devastating indictment of the forces
that threaten it. Whether Republican or Democratic, every administration
since World War II has fostered the destruction of large segments of
the blue-collar working class. Theriault maintains that America is the
poorer for such action, and argues that our society doesn’t need
to destroy this vital part of itself. Written for all workers, whatever
color their collars, The Unmaking of the American Working Class takes
a fresh look at the politics of work and its place in our society.

Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working
Poor in Early Modern England — Patricia Fumerton. Migrants
made up a growing class of workers in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century England. In fact, by 1650, half of England’s rural population
consisted of homeless and itinerant laborers. Unsettled is an ambitious
attempt to reconstruct the everyday lives of these dispossessed people.
Patricia Fumerton offers an expansive portrait of unsettledness in early
modern England that includes the homeless and housed alike. Fumerton begins
by building on recent studies of vagrancy, poverty, and servants, placing
all in the light of a new domestic economy of mobility. She then looks
at representations of the vagrant in a variety of pamphlets and literature
of the period. Since seamen were a particularly large and prominent class
of mobile wage-laborers in the seventeenth century, Fumerton turns to
seamen generally and to an individual poor seaman as a case study of
the unsettled subject: Edward Barlow (b. 1642) provides a rare opportunity
to see how the laboring poor fashioned themselves, for he authored a
journal of over 225,000 words and 147 pages of drawings. Barlow’s
journal, studied extensively here for the first time, vividly charts
what he himself termed his “unsettled mind” and the perpetual
anxieties of England’s working and wayfaring poor.

Up the Junction— Nell
Dunn. A succ's de scandale when it was published in England in 1963,
Up the Junction is a high-voltage, gorgeously visceral collection of
portraits of working-class women's lives, finally restored to print.
Nell Dunn's scenes of London life, as it was lived in the early Sixties
in the industrial slums of Battersea, have few parallels in contemporary
writing. The exuberant, uninhibited, disparate world she found in the
tired old streets and under the railway arches is recaptured in these
closely linked sketches; and the result is pure alchemy. In the space
of 120 perfect pages, we witness clip-joint hustles, petty thieving,
candid sexual encounters, casual birth and casual death. She has a superb
gift for capturing colloquial speech and the characters observed in these
pages convey that caustic, ironic, and compassionate feeling for life,
in which a turn of phrase frequently contains startling flashes of poetry.
Battersea, that teeming wasteland of brick south of the Thames, has found
its poet in Nell Dunn and Up the Junction is her touchingly truthful
and timeless testimonial to it.

U.S.A.— John
Dos Passos. Epic trilogy of American life in the first half
of the twentieth century. From the novel: "U.S.A.
is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies,
some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio
network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stock quotations
rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public
library full of old newspapers and dog-eared history books with protests
scrawled on the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the world's greatest river
valley fringed with mountains and hills, U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed
officials with too many bank accounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men buried
in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the
end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is the
speech of the people."

The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working
Class Life With Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments — Richard
Hoggart.

Voodoo Heart — Scott Snyder. Scott
Snyder takes seemingly ordinary characters, gives them unique and slightly
offbeat
voices and then lets their actions transform them. Heartbreaking moments
are interspersed with moments of profound transformation to give the
collection a completeness that is often missing from short story collections.

The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of
the American Working Class — David Roediger. Examines
the growth and social construction of racism as it was related to the
working classes of the ninteenth century. Explores how white workers
(with an emphasis on Irish Americans) sought after a "wage" for
their color, by placing on Black Americans the mantle of "other",
objectifying and stratifying blacks into an object of prejudice and
discrimination.

Waiting for Lefty — Clifford
Odets. In this 1935 play by an American playwright, cab drivers are planning
a labor strike.

Welfare, the Working Poor, and Labor — Louise
B. Simmons. Since the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act, it has become clear that the issues associated
with welfare are now inextricably woven into the problems of low-wage
work. This volume analyzes poverty and welfare reform within a context
of low-wage work and the contours of the labor market that welfare recipients
are entering. Given the new welfare regime of time limits and work requirements,
problems of welfare cannot be separated from problems of work, politics,
organizing, and other questions of social and economic policy. Although
there have been many volumes on welfare reform, the unique contribution
of this volume is that it brings labor into the discussion and creates
a bridge between the domains of labor and welfare.

Well — Matthew McIntosh. An unusual,
dark debut novel with an ensemble cast. McIntosh assembles different
episodes and voices to create an impressionistic tableau of Federal Way,
Washington, a blue-collar town facing the loss of blue-collar jobs and
culture. McIntosh's characters are introduced in first-person testimonies
and third-person sketches that build matter-of-factly and then trail
off ambiguously, like entries in a police blotter-if the police blotter
were written by Samuel Beckett. They lead lives of quiet despair, punctuated
by bursts of violence, benders and bad sex. Physical pain harries many
of the characters, madness others, and almost all are cursed with deteriorating
personal relationships.

What Night Brings (Working Classics) — Carla Trujillo.
This first novel by a Chicana writer who has been active as a lesbian
anthologist and editor is a pleasant surprise: a lively, picaresque tale,
told in the world-weary but ever-hopeful voice of 12-year-old Marci Cruz.
Marci's father, Eddie, is a drinker and womanizer who often takes his
belt or his fists to Marci and her sister, Corin, but whose wife, the
besotted Delia, seems oblivious of his faults. Much of the tale embraces
the ingenious ways in which Marci and Corin try to outwit him, or least
make their mother see him for the passive-aggressive monster he is; perhaps
the most delightful of these is the long saga of their attempt to photograph
him, with a cheap box camera lent by a sympathetic uncle, in incriminating
situations with his girlfriend. Through all this, Marci is also becoming
increasingly aware that she is romantically drawn to other girls and
wishes she could become a boy so as to express such feelings appropriately.

What We Hold In Common — Janet
Zandy. Anthology. Janet Zandy brings together-in poetry, fiction, memoir,
and song-the voices of working-class people throughout history, with
a strong emphasis on the often overlooked voices of working-class women.
Critical essays place working-class studies in perspective for teacher
and student, as scholars in the field write about recovering autobiographies
and oral histories, practicing working-class studies, and current and
emerging texts and theories. Course syllabi and curriculum materials
offer concrete strategies and resources for the classroom.

Where We Stand: Class Matters — Bell Hooks.
Incisive examination of class rooted in cultural critic hooks's (All
About Love) personal experience, political commitment, and social theory,
which links gender, race, and class. Starting with her working-class
childhood, the author illustrates how everyday interactions reproduce
class hierarchy while simultaneously denying its existence. Because she
sustains an unflinching gaze on both her own personal motivations and
on persistent social structures, hooks provides a valuable framework
for discussing such difficult and unexplored areas as greed, the quest
to live simply, the ruling-class co-optation of youth through popular
culture, and real estate speculation as an instrument of racism.

Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners
in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Women in Culture & Society) — Joanne
J Meyerowitz. Starting with Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Meyerowitz uses
turn-of-the-century Chicago as a case study to explore both the image
and the reality of single women's experiences as they lived apart from
their families. In an era when family all but defined American womanhood,
these women--neither victimized nor liberated--created new social ties
and subcultures to cope with the conditions of urban life.

Women in Labor: Mothers, Medicine, and
Occupational Health in the United States, 1890-1980 (Women
and Health: Cultural and Social Perspectives) — Allison L Hepler.
Early in the twentieth century, states and courts began limiting the
workplace hours of wage-earning
women in order to protect them from fatigue and ill health. It was felt
that a woman's role was to be a mother and that working too many hours
in an often unhealthy and dangerous workplace created risks to the performance
of that task. In the 1970s, many Fortune 500 companies began implementing "fetal
protection policies" to prohibit women from working in areas deemed
risky to reproductive capacity. Again, assumptions about motherhood were
the driving force behind employment regulations. Women in Labor examines how gender norms affected the workplace health
of men and women. Did the desire to protect women result in a safer workplace
for all workers? Did it advance or hinder the status of women in the
work-place? In answering these questions, Hepler describes a complex
network of medical experts, state bureaucrats, business owners, social
reformers, industrial engineers, workers, and feminists, many with overlapping
interests and identities. This overlap often resulted in tradeoffs and
unintended consequences. For instance, efforts promoting gender equality
sometimes created equal risks for workers, whereas emphasizing social
realities resulted in job discrimination. Reformists efforts to promote
the important connection between the home and the industrial environment
also allowed an employer to shirk responsibility for worker health. The
issue of women in the workplace will remain crucial in the twenty-first
century as workers worldwide struggle to create safer workplaces without
sacrificing socioeconomic benefits or the health of women and their children.

The Women Incendiaries — Edith
Thomas.
The Women Incendiaries tells the inspirational story of women who played
a leading role in the Paris Commune, one of history's greatest moments
of social upheaval.

Women of the Light — June
Guralnick. A play about female lighthouse keepers. "From 1776 to
1924, there were approximately 360 female lighthouse keepers and assistant
keepers working in the United States. Many more women unofficially tended
lighthouses with, or in place of, their husbands, brothers, fathers,
and sons."

Women on the Line — Ruth
Cavendish. Cavindish is the pseudonym of an academic who spent a year
working in an auto parts factory in England with mostly immigrant co-workers.
This book is adapted from the diary she kept at the time. She writes
about repetitive assembly line work, job discrimination, health, poverty,
immigration, a work-site dispute over wages and bonus and the women she
worked with.

Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's
Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922 (Working Class in American
History) — James
R. Barrett.

Work and Politics (Cambridge Studies in Modern
Political Economies) — Charles F Sabel. Work and Politics develops
a historical and comparative sociology of workplace relations in industrial
capitalist societies. Professor Sabel argues that the system of mass
production using specialized machines and mostly unskilled workers was
the result of the distribution of power and wealth in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Great Britain and the United States, not of an inexorable
logic of technological advance. Once in place, this system created the
need for workers with systematically different ideas about the acquisition
of skill and the desirability of long-term employment. Professor Sabel
shows how capitalists have played on naturally existing division in the
workforce in order to match workers with diverse ambitions to jobs in
different parts of the labor market. But he also demonstrates the limits,
different from work group to work group, of these forms of collaboration.

Working — Studs Terkel. Chicago writer and
radio host Studs Terkel has an amazing ability to draw stories out of
people in his oral histories. A
look at a wide variety of folks on the job."People talk about
what they do all day and how they feel about what they do."

Working Class Fiction (Writers
and Their Work) — Ian
Haywood. Chartism to Trainspotting.

Working Class Monologues — Roger Karshner.

Working-Class Stories of the 1890s — P.
J Keating.

Working Class Zero — Rob Payne. Office thriller/humorous
business novel has been done much better by other authors. Jay Thompson
is in a job he hates and is having a bit of a mid life crisis wondering
where the Rock'n'Roll career ambitions of his youth went and if he really
loves his girlfriend or should sleep with the hot new temp. Jay has to
deal with stuck up and unfair colleagues and management.

Working Classes in Victorian Fiction — P.
J. Keating.

Working Poor : Invisible in America (04 Edition) — David
K. Shipler. "Most of the people I write about in this book do not
have the luxury of rage. They are caught in exhausting struggles. Their
wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their lives,
and their lives, in turn, hold them back. The term by which they are
usually described, 'working poor,' should be an oxymoron. Nobody who
works hard should be poor in America." — from the Introduction

A Working Stiff's Manifesto: Confessions
of a Wage Slave — Iain Levison. Levison is a "modern-day Tom Joad" who, over
the last decade, has worked 42 jobs in six different states, including
mover, fish cutter, cook, caterer and cable TV thief. He recalls those
jobs in this entertaining, unusual mix of autobiography and social commentary
reminiscent of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting
By in America. Levison imagines himself a new breed of itinerant laborer
a college graduate with a $40,000 English degree. His America is a desperate
and brutal country, a place where you're hired with a promise of insurance
after 90 days, then fired on the 89th; where criminals beat each other
to a pulp in Alaska fisheries, and truckers make fraudulent entries in
their logbooks in order to keep up with impossible schedules. But Levison's
droll sense of humor eases him (and his readers) through the tough times;
he recalls catering a party and bleeding into the guests' Merlot, expounds
on the definition of "r sum " ("the French term for 'page
full of bullshit' ") and proposes a new motto for Dutch Harbor, Alaska
("What fatal flaw in your character made you wind up here?").
As both a writer and an employee, Levison can come off as a trifle obnoxious
some of his workplace misfortune he definitely brings on himself and he's
mercilessly scornful of the corporate yes-men and unscrupulous characters
he works with. Yet his moral vision more than makes up for it; he's a sharp-eyed,
impassioned critic of the American workplace.

Working the Hard Side of the Street : Selected
Stories, Poems, Screams — Kirk Alex. Contains forty-two prose poems
and fifty-two "screams" and stories written from the gut; honest,
hard-edged and, at times, explicit.

Working Classics: POEMS ON INDUSTRIAL LIFE — Peter Oresick (Editor), Nicholas Coles (Editor). So many foremen show
so many workers how to do something "like this" in this book
that after a while the phrase takes on a terrifying regularity, for these
poems are about work: the hard, monotonous kind that changes people for
the worse and makes ghosts of them. Almost all of these characters try
to have a real life away from the job site, but they're never quite successful:
one woman finds refuge in her partner's arms, but as she says, "big
husband dead thirty years now." There are 169 poems here by 74 fine
poets; one hopes at least a few bosses will read them. - David Kirby

Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian
Novel (Post-Contemporary Interventions) — Carolyn Lesjak (Author),
Carolyn Lesjak (Author). In this striking reconceptualization of Victorian
literary history, Carolyn Lesjak interrogates the relationship between
labor and pleasure, two concepts that were central to the Victorian imagination
and the literary output of the era. Through the creation of a new genealogy
of the “labor novel,” Lesjak challenges the prevailing assumption
about the portrayal of work in Victorian fiction, namely that it disappears
with the fall from prominence of the industrial novel. She proposes that
the “problematic of labor” persists throughout the nineteenth
century and continues to animate texts as diverse as Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Mary Barton, George Eliot’s Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, Charles
Dickens’s Great Expectations, and the essays and literary work
of William Morris and Oscar Wilde. Lesjak demonstrates how the ideological
work of the literature of the Victorian era, the “golden age of the novel,” revolved around
separating the domains of labor and pleasure and emphasizing the latter
as the proper realm of literary representation. She reveals how the utopian
works of Morris and Wilde grapple with this divide and attempt to imagine
new relationships between work and pleasure, relationships that might
enable a future in which work is not the antithesis of pleasure. In Working
Fictions, Lesjak argues for the contemporary relevance of the “labor
novel,” suggesting that within its pages lie resources with which
to confront the gulf between work and pleasure that continues to characterize
our world today.

Working in America: A Humanities Reader —
Robert Sessions (Author), Jack Wortman (Editor).

Working Life : the Promise and Betrayal
of Modern Work (00 Edition) — Joanne B. Ciulla. Joanne B. Ciulla, a noted
scholar in Leadership and Ethics, examines why so many people today have
let their jobs take over their lives. Technology was supposed to free
us from work, but instead we work longer hours-often tethered to the
office at home by cell phones and e-mail. People still look to work for
self-fulfillment, community, and identity, but these things may be increasingly
difficult to find in today's workplace. Gone is the social contract where
employees and employers shared a sense of mutual loyalty, yet many of
us still sacrifice personal time for jobs that we could lose at the drop
of a stock price. Tracing the evolution of the meaning of work from Aesop
to Dilbert, and critically examining the past 100 years of management
practices, Ciulla asks questions that we often willfully ignore at our
own peril.

World, Class, Women: Global Literature,
Education, and Feminism — Robin Truth Goodman. A path-breaking
book which not only challenges the market-based attack on all things
public, but also examines how theory and literature can be used to
reclaim feminism, schooling, and economic justice as part of a broader
effort in imagining a global democratic public sphere.

The Worlds End — series — middle
class leftish history novel from about 1911 to the 1950s.

A World to Win (Radical Novel Reconsidered) — Jack
Conroy.

Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class
Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire (Children's Literature and Culture)
— Troy Boone. Examines the representation of English working-class
children-the youthful inhabitants of the poor urban neighborhoods that
a number of writers dubbed "darkest England"-in Victorian and
Edwardian imperialist literature. In particular, the book focuses on how
the writings for and about youth undertook an ideological project to enlist
working class children into the British imperial enterprise. It is generally
assumed that the dominant middle-classes succeeded in recruiting the working-class
youth and thus easily manipulating these
young people for nationalist purposes. However, Boone demonstrates convincingly
that this was not the case and that the British working-class youth resisted
a nationalist identification process that tended to eradicate or obfuscate
class differences.

Articles/Overviews/Sources/Lists
of Working Class Literature

A Good Night Out — John
McGrath. The text of seven talks, a classic discussion of what working
class theatre and drama for (if not by) workers is about or should be.

From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor
and America's Future — Stanley Aronowitz. The future of American labor is deeply
connected to America's future. In the last quarter century, most American
workers — blue collar, white collar, and professional — have
taken an enormous hit, while only 20 percent of the population has prospered.
Corporate downsizing, technological change, mergers, and acquisitions
have cut the workforce by half in some industries; in others, the best-paid
employees have lost their jobs and have been replaced by part-time, temporary
workers who often lack benefits. Meanwhile, government protections are
slowly fading from the lives of ordinary Americans as health benefits,
pensions, and safety and health standards deteriorate. Stanley Aronowitz,
a teacher, writer, and former trade union organizer, examines the decline
of the labor movement in the past twenty-five years and its recent reemergence
as a major force in the country's economic and political life. Republicans
suddenly find themselves under attack from a forgotten foe. Democrats
are shocked to see this ghost walking about, compelling the party to
fight for a minimum-wage law it had practically abandoned. The labor
movement, once given up for dead, is now the engine of economic democracy
and progressive politics. But to succeed, Aronowitz argues, labor must
return to the social-movement unionism of Eugene Debs and Walter Reuther.
Such an energetic new movement is the key to America's future. Bound
to generate national debate, From the Ashes of the Old calls for a bold
new agenda, covering the principal challenges facing the labor movement
today: to organize in the South and among the working poor, to unionize
white-collar and technical employees, and to reestablish labor's political
independence.

Labor Embattled: History, Power, Rights (Working
Class in American History) — David Brody. American unions are weaker
now than at any times in the past hundred years, with fewer than one
in ten private-sector workers currently
organized. In "Labor embattled, David Brody says this is a problem
not only for the unions but also a disaster for American democracy and
social justice. In a series of historically informed chapters, Brody explores
recent developments affecting American workers in fight of labor's past.
Of special concern to him is the erosion of the rights of workers under
the modern labor law, which he argues is rooted in the original formulation
of the Wagner Act. Brody explains how the ideals of free labor, free speech,
freedom of association, and freedom of contract have been interpreted and
canonized in ways that unfailingly reduce the capacity for workers' collective
action while silently removing impediments to employers coercion of workers.
His lucid and passionate essays combine legal and labor history to reveal
how laws designed to undergird workers' rights now essentially hamstring
them.

Labor Pains: Inside America's New Union
Movement — Suzan Erem. Labor Pains is an insider's account of the struggle to rebuild
a vibrant and powerful trade union movement in the United States. It
takes as its starting point the daily experience of a union organizer,
and brings that experience to life. It enables us to grasp how the conflicting
demands of race, class, and gender are lived in the new union movement.
The role of the unions is defined mainly by larger economic and political
agendas. While keeping these agendas clearly in sight, Erem focuses primarily
on aspects of the life of the union which often remain hidden. The personal
crises of union members become entangled in the work of the union. The
energies of the union are focused not only on winning gains from bosses
but also on maintaining internal cohesion and morale among workers. Barriers
of race, age and gender are constantly negotiated and overcome, and conflicts
flare up across them at moments of tension. And union life goes on not
only when the workers have made their point, or won a victory, but after
defeat as well. The personalities and ambitions of union organizers converge
at times and become a source of tension at others. Each individual within
the larger collective has their own task of finding a viable balance
between public and private selves. These intersecting lines of force
are imaginatively recreated in this book. Erem writes as a woman in a
union movement which is dominated by men; as the child of immigrants
in a movement whose members are increasingly immigrants themselves; as
one who finds herself in the racial no man's land between black and white.
While never underestimating the obstacles in the way of the union movement,
she makes a powerful and passionate case for organizing the disorganized
and empowering the powerless.

Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial
Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921 — Joseph
Mccartin. Since World War I, says Joseph McCartin, the central problem
of American labor relations has been the struggle among workers, managers,
and state officials to reconcile democracy and authority in the workplace.

New Rank and File (00 Edition) — Alice
Lynd and Staughton (eds.) Lynd. In their narratives, rank-and-file workers
from many different industries and workplaces reveal the specific incidents
and pervasive injustices that triggered their activism. They discuss
the frustrations they faced in attempting to effect change through traditional
means, and the ways in which they have learned to advocate through innovation.
In an incisive introduction, the Lynds set forth their distinctive perspective
on the labor movement, with a focus on "solidarity unionism":
making decisions on the assumption that we all may be leaders at one
time or another rather than relying on static hierarchies. Their insights,
along with true stories told in the organizers' own words, contain much
to inspire a new generation of workers and activists.

Organizing to Win: New Research on Union Strategies — Kate Bronfenbrenner. At a time when the American labor movement is mobilizing
for a major resurgence through new organizing, here, at last, is a book
about research on union organizing strategies. Previous studies have
focused on factors contributing to union decline, devoting little attention
to the organizing process itself. The twenty chapters in this volume
dramatically increase understanding of the range and effectiveness of
new organizing strategies and their potential contribution to the revitalization
of the labor movement.
The introduction defines the context of the current organizing climate.
Major sections of the book cover strategic initiatives in union organizing,
overcoming barriers to worker support for unions, community-based organizing,
building membership and public support for organizing, and organizing initiatives
by industry or by sector. Individual chapters focus on topics such as organizing
outside the NLRB process, the role of clergy, local labor councils, and
rank-and-file volunteer organizers.

The Rights of Employees and Union Members — Wayne
N. Outten, Robert J. Rabin, & Lisa R. Lipman. An American
Civil Liberties Union handbook. Using a simple question-and-answer format,
the authors examine in detail a variety of topics encompassing
workplace protections, from hiring to firing and all the hours in-between.
Written for every working American, this book sets forth individual rights
under present law and offers suggestions on how workers can exercise
them.

Strikes, Picketing and Inside Campaigns:
A Legal Guide — Robert M. Schwartz. for any union or
activist considering aggressive action to combat management’s
growing economic war against workers. With a deep understanding of
the complex web of rules regulating forceful work-related activities,
noted labor attorney and author Robert Schwartz offers examples of
what unions can do, pointers on how to do it legally, picketing nstructions,
sample letters and answers to scores of common questions. Valuable
guidance is provided on working without a contract, residential picketing,
pressuring secondaries, unemployment benefits, unfair labor practice
strikes, offers to return, lockouts and other related topics.

Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for
Labor When It's Flat on Its Back — Thomas Geoghegan.
When it first appeared in hardcover, Which Side Are You On? received
widespread critical accolades, and was nominated for a National Book
Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. In this new paperback edition, Thomas
Geoghegan has updated his eloquent plea for the relevance of organized
labor in America with an afterword covering the labor movement through
the 1990s. A funny, sharp, unsentimental career memoir, Which Side Are
You On? pairs a compelling history of the rise and near-fall of labor
in the United States with an idealist's disgruntled exercise in self-evaluation.
Writing with the honesty of an embattled veteran still hoping for the
best, Geoghegan offers an entertaining, accessible, and literary introduction
to the labor movement, as well as an indispensable touchstone for anyone
whose hopes have run up against the unaccommodating facts on the ground.
Wry and inspiring, Which Side Are You On? is the ideal book for anyone
who has ever woken up and realized, "You must change your life."

A Will of Their Own: Cross-Cultural Perspectives
on Working Children — Manfred Liebel. Children's work
is on the increase in all parts of the world, including the affluent
countries of Europe and North America, and is closely linked with the
processes of globalization. It can take on widely differing forms and
can harm children, but also benefit them. This book's approach is distinctive:
it endeavors to understand working children, and their ways of living
and acting, from their own perspective. It is interested in the children's
own experiences and hopes, especially their attempts to speak out in
public and to fight together against exploitation and discrimination.
It shows that children frequently see and evaluate their work differently
from adults, and that measures directed against children's work are not
always in the interests of the children. It argues for a new, subject-oriented
approach in dealing with children's work, which takes account of socio-cultural
contexts, both in theory and practice. (If you have this book, please
provide feedback.)

Workers in Industrial America: Essays on
the Twentieth Century Struggle — David Brody. This famous book, representing
some of the finest thinking and writing about the history of American
labor in the twentieth century, is now revised to incorporate two important
recent essays, one surveying the historical study of the CIO from its
founding to its fiftieth anniversary in 1985, another placing in historical
and comparative perspective the declining fortunes of the labor movement
from 1980 to the present. As always, Brody confronts central questions,
both substantive and historiographical, focusing primarily on the efforts
of laboring people to assert some control over their working lives, and
on the equal determination of American business to conserve the prerogatives
of management. Long a classic in the field of American labor history,
valued by general readers and specialists alike for its brilliance of
argument and clarity of style, Workers in Industrial America is now more
timely than ever.

Windows on the Workplace: Computers, Jobs,
and the Organization of Office Work — Joan Greenbaum.
debunks technological determinism by looking closely at work and the
organization and meaning of work and jobs, finding that workers are enduring
insecurity, increased competition, demands for more and more specialization,
and management's inability to organize work properly. In this edition,
which she has updated to include current conditions in the workplace,
she describes the changes wrought by the computer in the office environment
in the past 50 years, the reasons why the office of the future has remained
in the future, and the clots of conventional wisdom that workers in the "knowledge
industry" must confront collectively if they want to do meaningful
work and avoid being absorbed into the milling millions of the downsized.

The Commons In nonindustrial
farming communities, “the commons" refers to a plot of land
that all farmers in the community can share. The commons is also a metaphor,
referring to any resource available to an entire group. This workgoup
thus becomes a virtual commons -- a space to discuss issues relating
to humanity and equality, on equal turf.

The Working Class Studies Discussion
List provides opportunities for interaction among people with a shared interest
in
working-class life, culture, and politics. Participants use the list
to share announcements of conferences, calls for papers, and events related
to working-class studies, and to enjoy a discussion about key issues.

The Federation of Worker Writers & Community
Publishers (FWWCP) — The FWWCP is a non-profit making umbrella
organization for writer's groups and community publishers. The FWWCP publishes
Federation Magazine, holds an annual Festival of Writing and develops
participation in the arts and cultural activities. Includes links to writer
organizations
and arts and cultural organizations in the UK:

Partisan Press (Blue Collar Review) — Partisan Press
is a not for profit publisher. Its mission is the preservation, expansion,
and promotion of the literature of the working class, primarily poetry,
which might not find a place in profit-driven publishing channels:

BOOKS — Lists, reviews, articles
about movies with
working class or labor themes

—

Reel To Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies — Bell
Hooks. Hooks's essays on film are not film criticism: they are criticism
of culture as viewed through the prism of film. This mix of theory, reality,
popular art and popular criticism (reviews and public reaction play a
large part in her discussions) is effective in forcing a rethinking of
the films in question... A discussion of the black female gaze recalls
that slaves could be punished for looking, and another on representations
of black masculinity notes that in movies with two male leads, one black
and one white, such as Rising Sun, the white man plays the "father" role.

These books are "working class" books. They may be pro-union,
or simply pro-worker. They may be anti-fascist. Some of them have a leftist
flavor, or an anti-war flavor.

Someone may make a distinction between "working class" books
and "labor" books. I agree that this is an important consideration.
I can even imagine a book that would be pro-"labor" and anti-working
class, given the nature of many unions. But while such distinctions may
be reflected in the reviews, i do not intend to create separate categories.
This is not for lack of appreciation, it is simply due to lack of time
or familiarity with the content.

I have not read all of these (or even most of these) books,
their presence here in most cases is the result of recommendations.

I've decided to add a method of voting against books that appear here.
Each (-) means that someone thought the book was innappropriate for
this list. Additional votes against books may get them removed from
the list.

Send me email (below) for additions or comments on existing entries,
or to write a brief review.

Note: while numerous of the descriptions found on this page are original,
many others are gathered, in whole or in part, from different sources
on web pages including Amazon.com, and others. No claim of originality
is made for any of the descriptions in these lists.